Football: Franz Beckenbauer: The shining figure and the twilight

He liked the forest. Franz Beckenbauer once wore a “Falling Autumn Leaves” jacket to a Munich Oktoberfest. As a ten-year-old, he painted a tree in art class. This later led a therapist to describe her as an “ambitious, energetic person who is good at repressing what hinders her.” Nothing seemed to hinder him. Handicap was just a golf term to him. He sang the simplest hits, was rarely photographed in the sweat of his brow, and dribbled perfectly between the “Bild” column and the Buddhist canon. For many years, Beckenbauer remained an existential artist for whom a successful life was recognized as his main profession. Every shot he took was a hit. The libero. The free man. Still in functional stress, an unattached person.

The son of a senior postal secretary in Giesingen, born in 1945 – he slammed the ball against the wall of the house at home for hours every day – was runner-up, European and world champion. With FC Bayern he became national champion, European Cup and World Cup winner. Because of him, even Pelé was persuaded to play a bit in the US operetta league. In 1990, the year of German reunification, Beckenbauer, as team boss (he doesn’t need a coaching license), brought the national team to world champion honors. What remains unforgettable is the way he walked quietly and absorbedly on the pitch after the game, unaffected by the cheers of the stadium. The proud loneliness of the gods’ favorite. A moment of great emotional theater. As if a victor allowed himself to be out of this world at the very moment of victory.

Thinking and feeling build strange bridges: We saw Beckenbauer in the East and thought of Peter Ducke; just as we heard the Thuringian “Polars” in the sixties and thought of the British “Shadows”. And vice versa. Comparisons are flawed, but they also make the most beautiful cross passes.

Beckenbauer remains a parable – for the core of adoration: fan behavior is a wild form of ecstatic satisfaction with the entire system knowledge that critical reason accumulates in us. Football: Suddenly the earth is really round. Is released for a kill that brings life into the place. “Football? Absolutely! I now want to give myself uninhibitedly to these millionaires, who actually make a mockery of the social condition of the world.” Words by Eduardo Galeano. One of Latin America’s great left-wing thinkers. What he describes is the collapse of careless devotion – despite precise knowledge of the situation. Because we know everything, just as everything was clear to us in the Beckenbauer case: football is a market for people and goods. For example, if you want a team (in the often disadvantaged East) to get promoted, you want them to have access to the vicious circle. And yet wishes more fervently than ever. Because of this inconsistency, ideological moralism of all stripes fails again and again.

On the field, Beckenbauer often seemed alone: ​​too good for his teammates – quality elevates, but a high level also distances a person from his peers. For a while he tried to stay on the ground: But his straddle career was short, he was no Kohler, no Sühle, no Hummels. He shot hard, but mostly he just tapped the ball and his foot twitched briefly. And he didn’t have to look at the ball, it was flying in his head. His conspicuous waiting before a pass was not helplessness, but technique; it was dramaturgy, amplifying the drama, long before the miserable phrase “switching game” came up.

At FC Bayern he became the coaching successor to a friend who had been fired (Erich Ribbeck), and eventually became president. The way up is a constant push from outside: Beckenbauer as the gentlest phlegm in the world. Business as captivating friendliness; calculation as the paragon of grace. The Mitsubishi salesman and foundation boss confessed: “Actually, I never did anything right.” What did Brecht say? There is another way, but that’s how it works. Beckenbauer was the man why philosopher Martin Heidegger secretly watched the “Sportschau” with one of his students.

Beckenbauer appeared more and more as a grizzled alien to the German model of prosperity, which for a long time, beyond its zenith, saw itself as an inheritance of success and performance and intelligence, an inheritance that was spent heavily, even when it no longer existed was. He always maintained a remarkable degree of restraint in the global popularity rush, but it did not save him from misfortune: money-greased suppleness, rhetorical negligence (as in relation to the conditions in Qatar) and ultimately a nasty sinking into the multi-million dollar FIFA craze. What remains, however, is that he brought the World Cup to Germany in 2006, and the sporting flourishing of the Germans became a cheerful signal: that exuberant national flags can simply be a sign of joy and lightness.

During the 1990 World Cup tournament, the German-German state treaty was ratified, and the Green Party Antje Vollmer declared: “Anyone who watches the German footballers these days will, like me, lose their fear of the Germans. They don’t just play well and successfully; They also play somehow beautifully.” You can talk politically so cleverly. And so fleeting. After the victory, Beckenbauer trumpeted: “Together with the East Germans, we will no longer be able to be defeated for years to come; I’m sorry for the rest of the world, but unfortunately that’s how it is.” It didn’t become that way.

Nobody survives the final whistle: Franz Beckenbauer, who died in Salzburg at the age of 78. Lonely, certainly disappointed – how much with the world, how much with yourself? He remains a star of that art in which sport and aesthetics can be thought of far more closely together than is generally permitted. Therefore, in the moment of sadness, for a moment and for the sake of the future, let us dream again of that Beckenbauer format. The beautiful game as a means to victory? No – may the purpose of winning create a beautiful game! Say football, but mean life, society. Beckenbauer’s aesthetics encourage such arrogance of thought.

That, too, can be called progress: that in Germany a man is hailed as “Kaiser” because he ran away from others with his head held high. At least on the field of play.

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