Tag Archives: germany

Europe 2026, Part VI: Up from Ashes

This is part six in a seven-part series that began here.

I am sad to leave behind the Prague party, could certainly have lingered, but my pace demands another journey. The train from Prague to Berlin follows the Vltava and Elbe Rivers to Dresden, through dramatic sandstone cliffs not unlike the Driftless Area of Wisconsin and Minnesota, only with some castles added for good measure. For this leg I share a seat with Andrés, a Chilean-born architect who lives in Marbella, Spain with his German wife and two kids, all of whom are on their way from vacation in Prague to visit family in Dresden and Leipzig. We scroll around Google Maps discussing our routes and our roots, and he picks out architectural features of the apartment blocks we pass. Eight-year-old Milo inserts insights on the games he plays on his tablet.

Andrés and family debark in Dresden, where he points out the old towers that have risen from the ashes of World War II carpet bombing, rebuilt as they were. Further north, the landscape melts into generic countryside, with only the occasional Schrebergärten plot to liven it up. The land is flat, the trees only showing the first hints of spring, and I understand why German migrants felt at home in the Midwest. Berlin arises in some charming, green suburbs, and then the train descends into a tunnel before entering the Hauptbahnhof.

After a series of historic, intimate city centers, Berlin is jarring. Here is a giant modern city, authoritative and commanding, any quaintness blown away by the Second World War. In some ways, the result hardly feels European. The flat land, grey skies, and elevated trains trip comparisons to Chicago in my brain, though the eastern Tiergarten feels more like the National Mall in Washington DC. The interiors of blocks reveal secrets: once, trying to find a restaurant, I wind up in the silent courtyards of a hospital; later, I slip into one and find a modern brewery that suits my needs for the night. And did I mention the beer? Berlin is a place where contributing members of society may be casually sipping cans on the subway at noon. Biergartens are everywhere, right in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Unter den Linden and scattered in any stray park, ready to welcome visitors for a casual night or a long descent into the German national drink.

The hostel where I have a private room is huge and utilitarian, my one lodging misfire on this trip. The clientele appears to be 80 percent under 22 and 19 percent over 50, and I find myself in a liminal zone. I am, finally, probably too old to pass for some 20-something traveler with all life commitments ahead of me, a state I could pull off even a couple years ago; I am still closer to them in energy, but it is no longer a natural fit to slide in. Any peers my age or somewhat older are with partners or families, and not really looking to meet random people. I am also too young to take on grizzled globetrotter status quite yet. And so I drift about, take a beer in the hostel café and chip away at my notes for these essays, glancing up here and there to watch the show passing by.

Mostly, however, I wander again. Berlin is a shift after all those walkable, quaint downtowns: while the pedestrian infrastructure is still good, this city is big and spread out, I make good use of a tourist metro pass. Around I go on subways and trams and elevated trains, popping out to see what the German capital has to show me. My first two days here are cold and on the bleak side, but my last full day in Europe is resplendent in sun, and I stroll across the Tiergarten and find a sprawling terrace to drink a lager and eat a full chicken. (“How many fucking chickens died for this place?” ask some Brits as they wander through and survey a host of Berliners enjoying this afternoon.)

Any visitor to Berlin should understand what it was before the Allied bombers unleashed their barrage and the Red Army marched in. Here was a city that was rising to surpass London and Paris as a center of culture and art, the confident capital of Europe’s largest, most ambitious state. The tale of twentieth century Germany is in part a story of tragic hubris and in part a story of what can only be described as pure evil, made somehow more discordant knowing that it came out of this refined, cultured, technically proficient young state at the heart of Europe. A nation fused out of old principalities by Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s was on a meteoric rise before the nonsensical charnel house of World War I and humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles fed into the toxic brew that unleashed a genocidal explosion.

The war and its aftermath hang over all of Berlin’s great tourist attractions. This city’s cosmopolitan feel, I suspect, comes from the fact that so many people in recent decades have had a chance to add their own bricks to its rebuilding process, rather than just inheriting the pristine old order of a Vienna or a Prague. It is unlike the rest of Europe because it is almost entirely a new city that rose from complete devastation in 1945. Many of contemporary Berlin’s cultural markers are gifts from later arrivals: doner kebab and currywurst may be its best culinary offerings, and the range on offer here beats anything else I’ve seen in Europe. Even the beer scene, while honoring its German roots, pulls from beyond; I spent a delightful night at Bierirei, with beers on tap from all over the world (including Central Waters in Amherst, Wisconsin!), and chat with a Belgian brewer and a crew of Swedes, all passing through to sample the fun.

The recovery process from past devastation, impressively rapid in the West but dragged out over decades by the division of Berlin, continues. Even Museum Island, with its remarkable collection of antiquities and artwork, bears the scars of war. The museums sustained damage, and though many great works were stashed away in bunkers, fire came for some of them, too. The Soviets made off with troves of loot after they sacked Berlin, and the ownership of many works remains a sticky topic. Even with these lasting wounds, Berlin’s collection of cultural capital is remarkable.

Alas, the Pergamon, home to a reconstructed Greek temple and Babylon’s Gates of Ishtar, is undergoing a three-year renovation. Berlin has atoned for its absence by creating the Pergamon Panorama, a museum across the street that features a few statues and friezes from the temple and a giant, four-plus story, 360-degree panoramic installation of what Pergamon might have looked like in the 100s AD. Next door in the Neues Museum I find the Bust of Nefertiti, along with some pieces from German antiquity and some Greek statues and a lot of Egyptology. The Germans do museum atmosphere well, too: the halls of the Neues have moody art and some Egyptian zodiacs on the ceilings, while the collection of sarcophagi in the basement very much feels like a tomb. Next door, the Bode Museum, home to sculpture and Renaissance and Byzantine art (because I just can’t quit the Byzantines), is a palatial structure. Giant doors open and close with slams, footsteps echo across cavernous rooms, and the occasional elevated train rolls by to break the silence of an early Saturday morning, a haunting aura given to the frescoes and altarpieces on display.

Most of Berlin’s history, however, is from the last century, and it is often heavy. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, right in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, starts as a row coffin-shaped concrete blocks that get taller the visitor descends into a maze, a brutal logic unfolding at the scale of a mass ordered slaughter. Peek down one row and an empty expanse extends toward the end of the memorial, down another a child flits in and out from behind the tombs, down yet another someone purposefully walks away, whether toward an exit from the madness or deeper into it one cannot really tell. A little ways south, by Potsdamer Platz, the Topography of Terror carefully documents the depravity of the Nazi regime. On the site of the old SS headquarters, a series of exhibits methodically outlines the choices made by National Socialist leaders and the fates of the perpetrators. Near the end it offers diaries of three different Berliners, all of different political backgrounds and orientations, revealing their thoughts as the depths of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis slowly came out.

Perhaps the most eye-opening thing for a first-time visitor is the extent to which Berlin is still rebuilding from the dramas of 1945 and 1989, even today. The antiquities collections are a window into a painstaking restoration still in progress, trotted out slowly after cleaning. Many great buildings have been rebuilt as they were, history nursed back to life with great care. Checkpoint Charlie preserves an older border station between East and West; here and there along the River Spree are memorials to people who were gunned down as they tried across the barrier to freedom.

And, at times, markers of past terror can be transformed into beauty. The East Side Gallery is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall remaining, and the art installation created after Germany reunited East and West tell a story of unity, reconciliation, and creative flowering. Here, artists came from around the world to put into vivid color their dreams of peace and triumph over communist cultural flattening, and three and a half decades later, it still speaks to the power of a halting but real achievement, perhaps does so more than ever in a world that has drifted from such ideals.

The culture that created the Gallery is not really that of Berlin today. 35 years after the Wall came down this city is less grunge and more corporate; new developments line the riverfront, and the Mercedes-Benz logo revolves atop a nearby office tower. The Berghain, the famed club that is the inheritor of that post-Cold War ecstatic burst of freedom, now has an hours-long line of tourists trying to get in. (I ponder joining the queue, but in the end use my limited Berlin hours elsewhere.) This is, after all, the capital of Europe’s largest country and largest economy, and in Angela Merkel’s 16-year chancellorship, it became the continent’s power center and de facto capital. Merkel’s Germany has shaken off the shackles of history and raced to lead the successful, if rather mundane, European present.

This is twenty-first century Germany: cushy, in command of Europe, its territorial ambitions now a distant memory, though its manufacturing-heavy economy has some brittleness to it. I hear things do not work quite as well as they did a decade ago, and the German habit for legalese and bureaucratic impulse is a regular frustration. (Said the British mom on the train out of Vienna who had lived in both countries: Austria is a logical society, and Germany is a legal society.) A general blandness pervades its politics, jolted only by some troubled murmurs from the far right AfD. What more, exactly, can the modern German state stand for?

Part Seven is here.

A Bland Euro

The European Championship is usually my favorite soccer competition. As great as the World Cup is, the Euro’s limited field almost guarantees good soccer throughout. Everyone deserves to be there, and there is no need to watch some team from Oceania struggle before making its inevitable exit in the group stage. These teams know each other well, have deep histories, and the best usually play enjoyable brands of the game. The 2008 and 2012 Euros both gave us some of soccer at its finest, with the titans all battling it out and a clear winner emerging ahead of the pack.

I was, therefore, skeptical of this summer’s expanded Euro format, with the field adding eight teams for a total of 24. There were some fine moments out of teams that aren’t Euro regulars, most obviously Iceland’s stunning upset of England, and Wales’ run to the semifinals was an added bit of fun. But on the whole, my worries were well-placed. With 24 teams fighting for 16 spots in the knockout rounds, the group stage is mostly just a formality for the good teams. Scoring, predictably, was also down: the additional teams’ only hope comes from that boring, park-the-bus style of play that plagued so many of the games. The bracket also shook out so that basically all of the traditional powers (France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England) were on the same side of the bracket while Switzerland and Poland piddled around on the other side. In the old Euros, every team in the knockout stages was either a superpower or had rightfully earned its berth. This time around, there were only a handful of compelling games in the first two rounds.

I’m not the only person who noticed the underwhelming product. ESPN’s studio show immediately after Portugal’s triumph was more devoted to trashing Portugal’s style of play and the tournament in general than it was to honoring Portugal. (Only in soccer does style take absolute precedence over who actually wins.) They weren’t wrong: Portugal was boring, basically incapable of winning a game within 90 minutes, and wouldn’t have gotten out of the group stage in the old format. The final was an appropriate end to the whole tournament, and while this was Portugal’s first major title, it’s not like they’re the new kids on the block in European soccer. It took some human drama in the form of Cristiano Ronaldo to keep it from being totally blah.

In part, the 2016 Euros were flat because (unlike the past two Euros) there really wasn’t a great team in it. Aging Spain’s reign has come to an end. Italy too was down, though they still looked like one of the top two or three teams in the tournament, and were stuck playing a good team early in the knockout stages. The Dutch didn’t even make it, despite the 24-team field. Belgium, who appeared poised to fill the power vacuum, underwhelmed, and still have nothing to show for their golden generation. The English, despite having one of their more promising sides in recent memory, choked royally, as the English do. Their flop provided the rest of the continent with some excellent schadenfreude post-Brexit, and probably infected a generation of good young players with the English soccer virus.

The closest team to greatness in France this summer was Germany, but the reigning world champions didn’t quite have the same edge as they did two years ago. They were still suffocating in their control, and somewhat terrifyingly were the youngest team in the field; the ease with which they plug in rising stars like Joshua Kimmich and Julian Draxler is remarkable. What they lacked this time around was the finishing touch. World Cup heroes Thomas Muller and Mario Gotze were out of form, and while Joachim Low found a temporary solution in Mario Gomez, he was unavailable for the semifinal with France. The German attack was reduced to cross after useless cross, and they folded surprisingly quickly after Bastian Schweinsteiger’s inexcusable hand ball in the box.

The French were steady and good, and seemed nearly inevitable heading into that final in the Stade de France. Then, however, they pulled a vanishing act in the final, either lulled into a false sense of security by Ronaldo’s injury or undone by the pressure of the moment. Antoine Griezmann was brilliant in the tournament, but seemed to run out of gas at the end, and could use some time off after a long and draining year that saw him burnish his credentials as a top-flight star, miss a penalty in the Champions League final, and endure the horror of his sister being trapped in the Bataclan nightclub when terrorists attacked Paris last November. Paul Pogba ghosted for long periods of time, leaving me once again wondering what all the hype is about. There was no shortage of collective talent to go along with the brilliant renditions of La Marseillaise, but the French whole never seemed to exceed the sum of the parts.

That left us with Portugal, another country that has had much more talented teams in recent memory. They went into the Stade de France having beaten no one of real consequence to make the final—their toughest opponent was probably Croatia—and for the first ten minutes looked very much out of place. All they needed was an injury to their world class superstar. After that, the defense locked into place, with Pepe clearing ball after ball and Rui Patricio on top of his game in goal, and once France started to press, the Portuguese decided that they might try their hand at that whole goal-scoring thing and indeed did so in extra time.

It’s been a strange year for Cristiano Ronaldo. He was fairly useless in the Champions League final before popping in the winning penalty for Real Madrid, scored a few goals but did nothing otherworldly in the Euros, and both his teams had remarkably easy paths to their respective finals. And yet, here he is, leader of two European champions in one summer. As a Barcelona fan I’m somewhat obligated to hate him, but this was a humanizing moment for the Madeiran magician, and a game that will, weirdly, improve his legacy. His raw emotion and attempt to play on that wrecked knee, followed  by cheerleading and coaching from the technical area later on, are, in a way, far more impressive than his endless highlight reel of goals. We saw a different side of Ronaldo in this one, with a player often critiqued for his diva tendencies coming into his own as a passionate leader.

It’s also befitting of Ronaldo that, in an otherwise less-than-inspiring tournament, he became the story. That’s the Ronaldo way: he is the center of attention, and this game was a reminder that sheer power of ego can be a good thing, too. And while he may never have Lionel Messi’s humility and ball-sharing skills, he can be a powerful force for a team just by being Ronaldo. (Though Ronaldo is better at paying his taxes, apparently.) Even though his actual role was minimal, it’s hard not to think he’s earned the right to claim a major international trophy. I don’t mind cocky athletes if they can back it up, and Ronaldo most certainly has throughout his career.

This redeemed Ronaldo will be my takeaway from Euro 2016, along with yet another sense that international soccer has grown too fat off its money grabs. We’re stuck with 24 teams in the 2020 Euros too, and UEFA is going with a gimmicky tournament with no single host country, with teams jetting everywhere from Baku to Glasgow to play their games. The final is even in a country that is no longer part of Europe. With Portugal’s success, I wouldn’t count on an attacking revolution in the next few years: expect more parked buses and sterile offensive outputs, and no number of washed-up pleading ex-player pundits can change that. True change would probably have to come from FIFA, which reassures no one. Oh well. Hey, we’ve got some summer hockey tournaments coming up.

Deutschland Victorious

This German boy can be proud of his heritage today, as Deutschland took home its fourth all-time World Cup title. The 1-0 victory over Argentina wasn’t quite a scintillating end to what had been a high-scoring tournament, and the game had slowly degenerated after a cracking start, but it was certainly deserved. Mario Götze’s 113th-minute strike was remarkably similar to Andrés Iniesta’s goal four years earlier, a final stroke of brilliance rewarding the better team and sparing us the misery of a final going to penalties.

The similarities to Spain don’t end there, though: this German side overcame my skepticism over any team’s ability to win by playing possession football in the 2014 Cup. Oh, me of little faith. I didn’t think anyone had the talent to pull it off, especially under the wilting Brazilian heat, but as a staunch defender of that brand of play, I’m happy to be wrong. I’d picked the Argentines before it all began, and across six games and 112 minutes of a seventh, they followed the predictable formula to a tee, relying on their well-organized defense and the occasional moment of magic out of Lionel Messi and company. It was a fine showing for the second-best team on earth, but injuries slowly hobbled Messi’s partners in crime, and Messi himself, despite being the most feared player on the pitch, was not quite at his stratospheric peak. He remains the best player of his generation, but there is still room to add to his legacy.

The German triumph, on the other hand, had nothing to do with any one star; ask five people who their best player in this Cup was, and you might get five different answers. Instead, they played a complete team game, a style not unlike Spain’s famed tiki-taka, only with an added dose of directness that made them even more dangerous. They were hardly a plucky underdog in that regard—they might be the deepest squad on earth, with an embarrassment of riches across the lineup—but, to quote someone I read over the past few weeks but cannot properly attribute, “the ball was the star.” In classic German fashion, they’re a seamless machine, playing a team sport as it’s meant to be played, and at the highest level possible. With the Spanish dynasty at an end, Joachim Löw’s men may be on the verge of their own great run. They’ve been threatening to go on one for years, and with this breakthrough and a relatively young core playing some of the most appealing soccer imaginable, what’s not to like? They’ve proven they can destroy teams that aren’t at their best defensively, and they have the patience to outlast those who are.

Still, the most memorable part of this World Cup was probably the hosts’ unequivocal on-field disaster. Brazil set out to replace the memories of the 1950 championship debacle against Uruguay, and they achieved it in the worst of ways in that 7-1 semifinal demolition in Belo Horizonte. A new generation of Brazilian fans has its own World Cup nightmare.

It wasn’t hard to see this ending poorly. The pressure was brutal from the start, and not once did the Brazilians impress; they always looked wobbly, and the resulting questions had coach Luis Felipe Scolari snapping at the media. The reaction to the Neymar injury likewise did not portend good results; the players holding up his jersey as if he were on his deathbed was a clear overreaction, and underscored the squad’s Neymar dependence. Brazil should have the depth to adjust to that sort of injury, but Scolari’s squad just seemed a disorganized throughout. The defense was filled with erratic players with little interest in defense, while the midfield was an inconsistent, revolving door; among the strikeforce, only Neymar and Oscar were remotely threatening. This Brazil squad had an identity crisis from the start, with no one really knowing his role, and the end result managed to combine the recklessness of o jogo bonito with the goonish defense of a modern, bus-parking squad, the worst of both worlds rolled into one. Brazil is in desperate need of new leadership that can seize control and impose a vision of some sort. If Alejandro Sabella can take an Argentine squad that had been so erratic four years earlier and turn them into a corps of defensive stalwarts, Brazil can certainly do something similar.

The team that dispatched of Brazil with little trouble in the third place match deserves a mention as well. The Dutch, written off before the Cup as both too old and too young, performed admirably, with Louis Van Gaal proving the anti-Scolari with his shrewd tactical moves. The Dutch weren’t always terribly fun to watch, but they got the job done, and Arjen Robben, despite the dives, was a marvel: he manages to be one of the most predictable players on earth, yet still, no one can really stop him. He gives hope to one-footed, prematurely bald bad actors everywhere.

It was a memorable World Cup, from German class to Brazilian infamy, from a very welcome goal explosion to a hungry Uruguayan. The U.S. and Mexico both took a step in the right direction, the French got their mojo back, and the Costa Ricans came ever so close to stealing our hearts with their stout defense. Chile and Colombia continue to climb in the right direction, and the Belgians, with a little more inventiveness, could be dangerous over the next few major tournaments. Spain’s golden age may be over, but there is still plenty of talent in the pipeline, and they’ll be back. In the end, Brazil put on a fine show, and even if their own fate was cruel, they, too, have hope for the future.

For now, though, the enduring image will be a bunch of young, swaggering, sculpted German models who had the ladies at my bar table swooning (and the grudging admiration of us gentlemen). The sweeper-keeper Manuel Neuer, the diminutive but dominant Philipp Lahm, the mercurial Mesut Özil, a bruising and bloodied Bastian Schweinsteiger, on the floor yet again. Mats Hummels upped his stock with a superb performance, Tomas Müller scored enough to make people forget his flopping, and Miroslav Klose wrote his way into the history books by surpassing Ronaldo on the all-time goals list, yet another indignity at the expense of Brazil. The crowning moment, however, belongs to Götze, the baby-faced Bayern Munich boy (he’s 22!) who will live in football fame forever. It was a triumph for a great footballing nation, a triumph for lively and attacking football, and also for Götze, who might have himself a northern Minnesota doppelganger when I finally get around to getting a haircut this week.

karl and mario

I can dream, can’t I? And sorry about the mate, Mario; I have some loyalty to all my Latin American countries after spending so much time studying them as an undergrad.