The national team of 1941 is seen giving the Nazi salute before a game in Sweden. (The vote on a recent visit, perhaps no surprise, ran 57 percent against England.)īut the museum does not shy from Germany’s past. Visitors can vote on whether the notorious third goal for England - when it clinched its lone World Cup, against Germany in 1966 - was, or was not, over the line. The Dortmund museum has fun features, like one that lets you become your own game commentator from actual broadcast booths. Hesse said, with even fourth-division games broadcast live on television while a recent world championship in handball, popular across Continental Europe, was ignored. After the 1980s surge of tennis through Boris Becker and Steffi Graf, “football is really pushing everything else aside,” Mr. “It shows you the connection between society and football,” he said.Īny soccer fan - in fact, almost any German - will tell you that the moment the country first felt able to return with dignity to the international arena after the evil of Nazism came with what is known here as “the miracle of Bern,” the 3-2 victory in Switzerland over favored Hungary to win the World Cup in 1954.īut that dominance mirrors the way soccer is drowning out other sports. “There are three most popular sports in Germany: football, football and football.”Īccordingly, the German Football Museum in Dortmund had more than 200,000 visitors in its first year, and the appeal is growing, according to the city’s proud mayor, Ullrich Sierau, an ardent fan of a multimedia museum he hails as “almost a visualization of Germany.” “You know the famous saying,” said Uli Hesse, author of a book on German soccer. Men, in particular, schedule important life events like weddings around (even more) important matches. Freekickerz, a soccer website, is the biggest YouTube site in Germany, with more than five million subscribers. In a country of 81 million people, the national soccer association is just shy of seven million members. Fussball, as soccer is known here, looms large in the national psyche.
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