The world is watching

With degrees from the Free University of Berlin and a doctorate in German studies from Vanderbilt University, assistant professor of German studies Oliver Knabe knows a lot about German language and culture. As a young academic, he is expected to publish.

Germany has a vast literary tradition to do research on. As he began to set off along that path, his wife, UD English professor Kirsten Mendoza, pointed out that he loves sports — so why not write about that? He took her advice. Today, all his publications focus on German sports studies.

Germany has many sports, but soccer — “football” to most of the world — is tied closely to national pride and identity. Only six countries have won the FIFA World Cup more than once; Germany has won it four times.

As the world prepared for this year’s World Cup (co-hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States), Knabe reflected on how international sports reveal both national self-perception and global perception. He has examined in particular two World Cup finals, 1954 and 1966, in which Germany competed.

Switzerland hosted the 1954 World Cup, the first major European tournament after World War II. The final in Bern became known as the Miracle of Bern — a title echoed decades later by the “Miracle on Ice,” when a young American hockey team upset the heavily favored Soviet Union in 1980. It was a natural David and Goliath tale.

In 1954, Knabe said, “the expectations among Germans were low. Massive favorites were instead the football artists, the mighty Magyars from Hungary, a team that had not lost a single one of its 32 previous matches.” Earlier in the tournament, Hungary had beaten Germany, 8-3. But Germany had defeated Yugoslavia and Austria to reach the final.

Hungary scored first. And second. But the underdog Germans came back to win, 3-2.

Hungary scored first. And second. But the underdog Germans came back to win, 3-2.

Germany’s first World Cup trophy came at a critical time in German history. WWII had ended just nine years earlier. The four occupation zones had been replaced only five years earlier by two German states with, Knabe said, “vastly different political foundations and affiliations.”

In West Germany alone, a million people were unemployed. Millions were displaced. But the effects of the war were more than economic and physical.

“Blame, guilt and repression tore at the spiritual and ethical fabric of the German collective,” Knabe said.

The game of football had also suffered. Many players never returned; others lacked proper equipment or fields. But football helped the healing. It became, he said, “an important cultural component in post-war life with regard to German morale. Players and local clubs possessed the potential for positive identification, that is, players served as role models and clubs provided a sense of community.” Games provided a welcome distraction.

In 1999, 45 years after the “Miracle of Bern,” Nobel laureate Günter Grass said, “We are back, losers no more.” Around the same time, former chancellor Helmut Kohl claimed Bern triggered a collective sense of “We are somebody once again!”

“We are somebody once again!”

Notably, Knabe said, is that this narrative of “a World Cup victory as a turning point or even the spiritual founding of a new Germany is, as more recent research has shown, a modern myth that does not actually reflect the perceptions and the self-image of the West Germans in 1954.”

The “Miracle” did not play a role in public discourse until the early 1990s. By the time Knabe was taking high school political science in the early 2000s, the victory was taught alongside the founding of the two German states and West Germany’s economic miracle.

Knabe believes “the shaping of one’s own national image is a continuous process that borrows from past events.”

Knabe’s dispassionate analysis of 1954 is harder to apply to 1966, though neutral observers can conclude that German soccer fans are justified in using the classic sports refrain, “We wuz robbed!” (If Wikipedia’s sources are accurate, analysts at English universities using modern film analysis techniques concluded England’s deciding “goal” needed to travel about 6 more inches to really be a goal.)

That England’s first World Cup championship remains its only one is perhaps some consolation to Knabe.

Besides feeling the outcome to be an injustice, Knabe has studied the language of the English media reporting on the tournament and noticed certain trends. Sports, he said, “have a history of using military jargon, as words like ‘defense,’ ‘offense,’ ‘attack,’ ‘shooting,’ ‘striking’ suggest.” During archival research at Oxford University last summer, Knabe focused, he said, “on the English media’s representation of West Germany and its footballers and also on the ways in which English reporters depicted their own team.”

Early reporting on the German team was favorable. It attributed to the Germans qualities, Knabe said, “such as directness, boldness, confidence, skilled, powerful and described them as spectacular, entertaining and compelling.” Perhaps underlying attitudes were revealed by the appearance, even in these positive reviews of references to “Teutonic tribes,” “ruthlessness” and “systematic slaughter.”

But overall, the Germans were seen positively. One paper described a German goal in an early match as “majestic,” a term Knabe said he “could not find when [he] looked at the reporting about the English team.”

But as the England-Germany matchup approached, the tone shifted. “Germans,” Knabe said, “were now ‘brutish’ and they were accused of Hollywood-style acting and faking injuries.” In a match against the Soviet Union, Germans were seen as “armed,” while the Soviets were “bruised,” “scarred” and “wounded.” The Times compared the match to a naval battle, Knabe said, and invoked the “spirit of Stalingrad.”

Coverage of the English team also changed. A semifinal win over Portugal, one commentator said, “gave sanity and skill back to football.”

The final presented English sports writers, not known for their restraint, with an opportunity to escalate. The Daily Mail wrote: “While players reeled from weariness, somehow the survivors collected themselves into little groups and mounted raids upon men, who watched them come with gray faces and legs that would not respond.”

Knabe noted that one especially florid account included two misspellings. He also objected to a description of German supporters: “The noise from the terraces was that of a small Nuremberg rally.”

While sports sections fanned militaristic flames, Knabe noted an irony — political news covered NATO allies England and Germany negotiating the demilitarization of the Rhine.

As time passed, Germans also wished to move on. When Munich hosted the 1972 Olympics, the government, wanting to avoid a militaristic image, disarmed German security teams and law enforcement. Then terrorists attacked the Israeli team, “one of the most tragic examples of how significant the impact of national images during sporting events can be.”

National images, Knabe believes, reflect both who we are and who we aspire to be.

“Global competitions like the World Cup,” he said, “provide a nation with the opportunity to structure a narrative about itself, but they also have the potential to reveal the cracks in those fragile images, revealing just how far we are from where we want to be.”

“Global competitions like the World Cup provide a nation with the opportunity to structure a narrative about itself, but they also have the potential to reveal the cracks in those fragile images, revealing just how far we are from where we want to be.”

Photograph by DB/Picture-Alliance B/DPA/AP Images; Portrait provided by Oliver Knabe.

A version of this article appears in print in the Summer 2026 University of Dayton Magazine, Page 18. EXPLORE THE ISSUE — MORE ONLINE