Michaela Maria Müller – this love makes you lonely

Football fan literature is published by Nick Hornby at the beginning of the 90s, at the latest with »Fever Pitch«, at the latest with »Fever Pitch«. After music, football forms the most popular scaffolding to tell a coming-of-age story.

It is all the more surprising that there are almost no women’s soccer fan biographies. In 2013 Wiebke Porombka in “The twelfth man is a woman” told about her passion for Werder Bremen and especially for Kalle Riedle. Only now, more than ten years later, that Michaela Maria Müller does the same: Bayern, but above all, Jürgen Klinsmann, who enchanted her enchants.

Müller’s book, which was published by Voland & Quist, is very narrow. It counts just over 90 pages, and in the end the realization remains that Coming of Age is also letting go of idols and dreams. In the last chapter, Müller notes that four out of five items, which was created as a twelve -year -old Bucket List, are simply faded. Perhaps the youthful dreams and needs are not as formative as the male -dominated idea of a coming of Age suggests. Perhaps it is not that tragic when the burning desire of the youth converted into a kind of irritation in the world.

But that doesn’t mean that someone would ever have loved Jürgen Klinsmann more than Michaela Maria Müller. She loved him with fervor and especially in a kind of loneliness that always goes to the male foundation, because the male fantum always also aims at an imaginary community, on a place in the social structure. Michaela Maria Müller’s impulse, on the other hand, was outside – and thus in the middle of the love of idol.

Football likes to assert itself as a reflection of society and as a equalizer: all social differences are wiped out in the curve, the main thing is that the heart is at the club. That is why he should be apolitical. The fact that this argument is adjusted with this argument to recognize differences and inequalities in the fan biographies, means that right fans in particular like to use it so much: they don’t want anything else from the other people than their peace. This is how you define your devotion: a kind of sublimated narcissism.

Müller opposes innocence and a passion that tells of a love in her loneliness and ineffectiveness that longs for the community, but does not find a way to dock. Once she goes to football training to approach her passion – that was a big step in the 80s and 90s when the boys were to break up during the boys – and then fail there as a goalkeeper because she cannot beat the ball far enough.

Not only is what Michaela Maria Müller writes down on this narrow book, but also what is missing: the inauguration by any father figure, the first visit to the stadium, the first own goal in the village club. Michaela Maria Müller is not granted this type of fan love that – football fans themselves will not like to hear this millions of times, so that she has something large -romant. For never clear reasons, it is still enchanted, from two sides: on the one hand from FC Bayern and on the other hand by his center forward from 1995 to 1997, Jürgen Klinsmann, to whom she writes letters.

The question is: What does this specifically female look add to the phenomenology of the football fantum? Is there a difference to male fans at all? The answer would be: probably no longer today. At the latest since the 2006 World Cup, when Klinsmann was a national coach, the number of women has increased rapidly in the stages and on the lawn.

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But if you grew up like Müller or Porombka in the 80s, as a girl, you had to commit to the idol. This form of unconditional worship of a star that serves as a projection surface can also be found in a journalistic form at Birgit Schönau, which in her famous book »Calcio – The Italians and her football« 2005 started with full praise on Francesco Totti; At the same time, however, there is almost no lack of the “26 stories from the edge of the field”, which Stefanie Fiebrig brought me into “Bring me to law” in 2014-one of the few other literary women-soccer fan biographies ever.

Müller’s book blows up a touching loneliness, especially because it is very straightforward and frankly told. If it were a playing style, Mirko Slomka would probably have designed it. “Klinsmann” perhaps undermines the expectations of a fan biography precisely because these expectations are wrong-this will have to engage who reads this book.

In this respect, it is political in this way than is otherwise the politically interested football literature. In his Swabian -based cosmopolitanism, Klinsmann means a kind of paradigm shift in the perception of German football worldwide. With his way of letting football played, he prepared the title in 2014; He was also responsible for the 2006 World Cup as head coach and advertising perspective, who, with her supposedly harmless party patriotism, ensured a clear shift to the right in society. The fact that exactly the Klinsmann can also be a hanger for a rebellion in a biography can only be solved by recognizing that hero is not an eternal worship.

Michaela Maria Müller: Klinsmann. A letter novel. Voland & Quist, 96 p., Br., 12 €; E-book € 7.99.