European Football Championship: Game to open spaces

Albert Ostermaier, “your” Bayern Munich “only” came third last season – will you still accept my congratulations?

The slogan of Jenö Konrad, the great Jewish coach of 1. FC Nürnberg, who was driven out by the Nazis, was always: Be first! But I believe that second place for Bayern this year is first for the future. Without defeat there is no change. And without change, no (next!) championship.

Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, is called the “Theater of Dreams”. Your idea of ​​the “Stadium of Dreams” also tells dramas. You yourself contribute a piece about George Best. The magician of Manchester, played by Lars Eidinger – what mental landscape will emerge?

The soul landscape is a piece of grass surrounded by tiers. The penalty area is the striker’s place, whether he becomes a heavenly striker or goes through hell, whether bad luck sticks to his boots or the wing feathers fall from his shoulders like leaves in autumn. Every striker has to dream his goal, in spaces that are only open to him. Lars Eidinger is to theater what George Best was to football: the fifth Beatle. The grass beneath him burns like the stage. He transforms faster than his shadow. I’m sure Ovid would have written about him.

“The better man should win” or “I am always for the weaker” – is a real football fan capable of thinking so dryly and decently?

These are the two worst sentences there are when talking about football. It couldn’t be more hypocritical. The better one always wins, because whoever wins is the better one.

“Situations are the mothers of humanity.” Brecht.

Brilliant sentence. A push against the mentally stuck. Football is a form of possibility, and the fascinating thing is that even those who are considered weaker can win, of course. It’s this legend of David versus Goliath. Of course, everyone is rooting for David and wants to see themselves as part of this narrative: that weakness turns into strength. And that you can disempower those in power with a slingshot. So that fate is fair.

Football isn’t fair either.

But: Stigmatizing the stronger is cheap. As if it were morally reprehensible to have a better team. Anyone who only cares about seeing the strongest fall has no understanding of football and is instead projecting into sport a class struggle that no longer exists. Because they all play on the capitalist team.

All of them, all of us.

Either way.

Is football a consolation or defiance for you? In an alternative, lazy, wandering society?

The surprise; the calligraphy of a play; the indefensible ones being held – that is comfort.

To forget what?

Everything that happens outside the lawn. For me, football also meant defiance – against accusations; as a poet, I made common cause with the trivial. It’s over. Today I say: Still football! Despite the business of Mr. Giovanni Infantino.

Be in the “Stadium of Dreams” in Munich Marcel Reif and Rachel Salamander discuss anti-Semitism. This doesn’t sound like a new edition of the legendary, damaged summer fairy tale of yore.

In the “Stadium of Dreams” we also want to talk about nightmares in order to regain the dream of a just society.

That’s a high note! Nail the ball to the clouds?

They scoff. I admit, when shooting at goal you have to hold the ball a little flatter. But not when dreaming; unfortunately, for both good and bad reasons, we are terribly intoxicated by disillusionment. But if you don’t have the strength to dream, you don’t have the strength to live, says Ernst Toller. Football on the street or in the ghettos or in the clubs where refugees play on a team with locals, sport on the pitch where there is no racism – that can be a life-changing experience for young people. People who play with each other talk to each other differently.

What do you say to those who constantly demand that football professionals take a public position as citizens? Of course system critical.

The only valid criticism of the system from a professional is that it would have been better to play 4-3-3 instead of 4-4-2.

Now it’s you who’s scoffing.

Not at all. Of course, I think it’s great when footballers use their public impact to say the right things and help a little to change society. But so many answers are standardized and drilled in. A footballer usually gets through the world with ten sentences, Thomas Müller is almost a Jean Paul in comparison. We should ask ourselves why we demand from footballers what we ourselves so often fail at, namely: to show attitude. Isn’t it unbearable when everyone everywhere talks about things about which they have no idea, no in-depth knowledge, but just a simple, banal, unimportant opinion?

The poet Volker Braun wrote in 1990: Only now do we, in the East, have a biography, because disruption, failure, loss are prerequisites for a first-hand experience of history. Do you feel the same way, as a person from the West, which is playing so victoriously?

Volker Braun is one of the greatest German poets, who is also a thinker with a sharpness and precision that is hard to find anywhere else. The sentence is burned into his skin, which he then pulls over the GDR’s head. But I think that even before 1990, the GDR was a historical experience worth considering: the height of the falls was commonplace and the clouds were enormous above. And I don’t know whether the so-called West is really victorious. I tend to see fake victories by fake giants. After the 1990 World Cup, Beckenbauer said that with the GDR players we would be invincible for a long time. He wasn’t right – and yet he could have been right: if we had seen ourselves, socially, as a team that developed a new game system together.

Should the Germans be granted victory at the European Championships in order to once again wipe out the funny sect of anti-Germans?

Football is a game of identities. That’s what I love about it. The national team is a more honest picture of Germany than the Bundestag. Anyone who is against the national team is against a society in which everyone can play. The Germany of the national team is a Germany that we have not yet reached elsewhere.

What about Germany gives you courage and hope?

When I see how many people want to vote for the AfD, I lose all courage and ask myself what we have to change so that we don’t suddenly wake up in fascism. But hopelessness is the success of the destroyers of hope. That’s why we can’t let up. We have to educate, educate, educate. Fear eats up democracy.

I know the goalkeeper is the real adventurer for you. Why?

You have to put yourself in situations that can be very painful, without thinking too much. This willingness to take risks, this immediacy is something that you also want for your life – but cannot be achieved in everyday life.

Why not?

Keywords are enough: cowardice, complacency, insight into false constraints.

What happened to the goalkeeper gloves that Bayern goalkeeper Sepp Maier gave you as a child?

They were lost. The Holy Grail. I have to find her again.

You can ask the football god three questions. Which would they be?

Completely selfish: Am I ever allowed to stand in goal again despite my spinal problems? How can you write a football novel that can compete with US baseball novels? And would it be possible to find a punitive place in Purgatory for Infantino and the like? As quickly as possible.

The football god can ask you just one question. But which ones please don’t?

Wasn’t that a goalkeeping mistake?

You have a “Wish List,” a text based on “Orje’s Wish List” by Brecht. Strange: When you talk to you, you always want to bring up the man from Augsburg.

For me, he has depth of field where he is dark and evil and wise. Where he is part of the immediate political context, I understand his attitude, but I find him boring as a poet. One cannot interpret human existence in a completely materialistic way.

Your “wish list” says: “from the Germans, the Schweinsteiger/ from the Bastians, the Übersteiger.” That was over ten years ago. Please update this list.

I can’t yet. When Bastian’s career ended, something died in me, an idea of ​​a player that excited me. Schweinsteiger, who kept getting up. When he played, I could get excited in a way that I can no longer do today, or very rarely. Maybe it will come back and with it a new list. I don’t like these players who look like they come from the Playstation. I like really old-fashioned characters.