20 years ago, a German revolution.

Episode One: Comfort ye, my people

On 11 March 2006, the SPIEGEL magazine ran an unusual cover, half ironic, half worried : it shows Jürgen Klinsmann as a modern Atlas, crushed by the weight of the ‘celestial sphere’ in the form of the official ball of the forthcoming World Cup, with only three months to go.

The title, ‘Der Ball Deutschland’ (The Ball Germany), is delightfully polysemic. It plays on both the saturation of the media and public discourse by the upcoming event and the creeping fear of failure that has taken hold of the country, embodied by the deflating ball of the picture.

Finally, it also plays on the similarity between ‘Ball’ and ‘Fall’ (the latter meaning ‘the case’). It refers to the title of a book published in 2005 by Stefan Aust and Gabor Steingart, respectively editor-in-chief of the SPIEGEL and director of its Berlin office. Der Fall Deutschland was a best-selling book with a very liberal undertone about the decline of Germany, the former ‘superstar’ of the economic miracle now weighed down by a poorly digested reunification, an inability to reform, threatening globalisation and, of course, an overly generous welfare state. The book was also accompanied (and promoted) by a television documentary series.

The suggested analogy of German politics with the decline of the Nationalmannschaft, which had pitifully failed its Euro 2004, fell in line with a long tradition of drawing parallels between the evolution of the Federal Republic and the fortunes of German football. It imposed itself on DER SPIEGEL not only for its nice occasion to engage in some nice and easy self-referential self-promotion, but also as a good metaphor to reflect the panic that gripped both the media landscape and the sporting world at the prospect of ‘missing out’ entirely on the World Cup due to the lack of competitiveness of its flagship team. Even politicians got involved, with one backbencher MP in need of publicity demanding that the coach be called to explain before the Bundestag how he intended to avoid utter embarrassment in June.

It is true that the team was struggling. It had just suffered a very unpleasant thrashing by Italy in a friendly test match on 1 March in Florence, losing 4-1. This performance was the pretext for an unprecedented media campaign against Jürgen Klinsmann, to the point where, ten days later, the long article in the SPIEGEL displayed compassion, even pity, for the former player who had accepted the most thankless job in the country in July 2004, with the firm intention of launching a revolution within the DFB, the venerable German football federation endowed with both an impressive track record an an ultra-conservative, and very provincial, DNA.

Jürgen Klinsmann's two years at the helm of the German national team provide a fascinating case study in change management in a hostile environment. We will recapitulate it, in the safe distance of twenty years and based on the author’s media archive and field research notes accumulated at the time, in a series of seven short posts.

Next episode: But who may abide the day of his coming?

(Just in case you wonder where the strange headlines of these posts come from: they are all taken from Händel’s Messiah, the libretto of which was compiled by Charles Jennens mainly from extracts of the from the King James Bible).