Germany's New Nationalism

Underneath the celebration of the German soccer team at this year's World Cup lies something darker.

Every time the German team scored during a World Cup match, I cheered – and immediately felt bad.

There was a tiny man in my head that kept wishing the German team would not win. It was the voice of caution, the one telling me not to get involved in German patriotism. But why couldn't I, as a German, just relax and root for my team? Why couldn't I wave a flag and paint my face like soccer fans in other countries do? Because German nationalism just isn’t normal.

Since 2006, when the championship was hosted in Germany under the motto “A time to make friends,” Germans have insisted that their patriotism is perfectly normal, perfectly all right, and nothing special at all. Just plain good fun, not an ugly, deranged, xenophobic, anti-Semitic beast.

But in trying to show just how normal they are (compared to every other nation, which try to show how special they are), Germans show exactly the opposite. German newspapers love to show black girls waving German flags after a victory and quote foreigners saying how good it is to see the Germans finally showing some national pride.

There is constant pointing at the fact that the German team is "mulit-ethnic," with players named Cacau, Özil, and Podolski. Nobody seems to notice that pointing this out reinforces the idea that "true" or "complete" Germans still have to be named Schweinsteiger or Müller. Players with ethnic backgrounds are labelled as such. There remains the perception that you can never really become German except by blood. It is not like other countries, which simply declare you a citizen when you are born on their soil or pledge allegiance to the country.

Germans who think this way fail to take into account practicalities. German passports are so easily obtained by top athletes, especially soccer players, because the German team simply would not stand a chance if it demanded an Aryan certificate. Or, in the words of the German politician Günter Beckstein: "We need more foreigners that are useful, than foreigners that abuse us." The brutality of this statement in its original German is lost in translation.

German nationalism and patriotism has changed. It is now perfectly possible to celebrate the end of the Second World War on May 8 and the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, while at the same time showing strong nationalism and even anti-Semitism. Having learned from history, it is considered a right, if not a duty for Germans to criticize Israel. The Holocaust has allowed Germany to take the moral high ground because Germans now know what is good and what is bad.

This new nationalism is not just the summer party patriotism of the World Cup. Sometimes, the ugly truth breaks the surface. When Israel gave zero points to the German singer for the Euro-vision song contest, angry, anti-Semitic groups appeared on Facebook and similar sites. When the German-born soccer player Kevin-Prince Boateng, who plays for Ghana, injured the German player Michael Ballack prior to the World Cup, meaning Ballack couldn’t play for the German team, "fans" posted death threats online. And this type of behaviour can be seen off the internet, too. During the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the rate of crimes with xenophobic elements rose sharply.

By constantly stating how perfectly normal this new patriotism is, the lingering fear that it actually isn't is plainly visible. Luckily, the World Cup is over and the level of overt patriotism being expressed by Germans is getting lower and lower. And thankfully I will not have to worry about which team I want to root for anymore.