Germany's Transformation

9th of June was my father's birthday, the start of the World Cup and the starting shot to write my master thesis, so I decided against watching the game Germany - Costa Rica.

After hearing the first noises of the pub next door I closed all windows and successfully ignored the first excitement, the honks, the first waving flags and all other slightly inflaming indications of the upcoming win.

Then, when seeing Germany game against Poland, I was amazed about the atmosphere afterwards. There were so many people on the streets, singing, waving their flags, and an endless street parade of honking cars with people sitting on the windows and roofs. I guess this was my first realisation of the newly opening feelings about being proud to be German, to show your flag, the strong spirit of common hope and togetherness. It was really special to witness this emerging feeling, the newly building identity and confidence which I have never seen beforehand.

Until recently people here had tough times to try to sing the national hymn or find a German flag anywhere. The modest, inconspicuous crowd, which rather felt uncomfortable to identify as a German, is all of the sudden turning into a loud, happy, and united Germany, including the many diverse foreigners, who are living here.

I guess Germans have never reported that much about themselves on the news and TV, about their way of celebrating, whether it is legitimate to behave this way, and once can observe even a generational divide. The younger ones seem to be happy to be at ease with their national identity and highly enjoy the happiness and celebrations, the change in environment and behaviour whereas the older generations, who also witnessed the world cup in the 70's and 90's more consciously, tend to still feel more wrong about it. Probably also, it is due to their high ambitions to make all the international guests feel highly comfortable, that German's slogan for the World Cup "Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden" - (literally: The World being guest at friends) actually was also perceived as such by the visitors.

Anyways, after the gran final on friday, tonights the game against Italy - enjoy watching!

Go Ozzies! - Australias first win in the world cup

Awesome game, they really turned it around it in the end. The first half was a great play, though Australia having the better chances, more ball contacts and double the number of shots, Japan kept leading 1:0 until the last 15 minutes of the game. I was about to turn back to my master thesis - which has waited for another 80 pages to be written - when the Australia team finally woke up. Their first goal ever in a world cup! ;) Yeihji. That truly kicked-off their play and the 2 other goals followed within a few minutes.

As a side note - I found it quite amusing how there were only a few lines about it on the Australian news site, while you could read a three page documentation on the German news page.(in German)

Good luck with the rest of the World Cup, Brazil is waiting ;)