Euro Exits

 

The Johannis Sommergarten

The Euros are coming to an end and once again I have witnessed the phenomenon of German fans’ fervour for major international football tournaments. Besides the larger public spaces such as beer gardens, it seems that every bar, café, restaurant and even the odd späti, has a screen set up so that customers can watch the games. Sometimes it’s just a cronky old TV on a table or a flatscreen hanging in a tree. They are protected from the elements by umbrellas or by makeshift canopies fashioned from bits of wood or chipboard. Many of these arrangements are very precarious and involve hazardous-looking tangles of cable but the opportunity to watch Albania against Switzerland while tucking into falafel or pizza outweighs any trifling health and safety concerns.  

 

Screen outside a Vietnamese restaurant on Dunckerstrasse

As we were here for the World Cup in 2014, we were well prepared and knew what to expect but it still amused me when I was walking home from an event on Veteranenstrasse during the first week of the competition, to find the streets full of people watching the game between Portugal and Iceland on outdoor screens.

In the weeks leading up to the tournament the shops began to fill with football-related wares, from special beer packs and black, red and gold pasta to crisps with players’ names worked into the flavours (Lukas Paprika being a particularly excruciating example).  In the grocery sections, aubergines, tomatoes and yellow peppers were arranged into flag-mimicking black, red and yellow rows.

Germans took to the streets on matchdays wearing football shirts, flag make-up and schwarz-rot-gold garlands, and every German goal triggered a city-wide firework display.

Alan and I watched the opening game between France and Romania at the Castle Pub in Gesundbrunnen.  I like this bar a lot, it’s a sprawling space with a craft beer bar and, tucked away at the back the tiny but excellent Carcosa cocktail bar. The following evening we met some friends for England’s game against Russia at the Johannis Sommergarten, a lovely no-frills beer garden tucked away behind a church in Moabit. That evening there was a Turkish wedding in progress in the adjacent community centre and guests periodically stole into the beer garden to catch a glimpse of the match.  We were joined at our table by a wine-drinking chap who had no great affection for England but grew more sympathetic as the game wore on and seemed almost disappointed when Russia equalised in the dying minutes.

I didn’t watch England’s game against Wales as it was played on the day that Jo Cox was murdered and I couldn’t think of watching football that day. In fact for the following week I had no appetite for the tournament at all as it became overshadowed by other events. It wasn’t until friends Abby and Albert invited us to watch Germany’s last sixteen game against Slovakia over a barbecue at their flat that my interest began to rekindle.  On the way there we called in to watch Ireland’s game against France at Emil’s on Schönhauser Allee, a typically ramshackle space with a beer garden and Italian pizzeria occupying a yard surrounded by crumbling factory buildings. Rows of deckchairs were arranged to face a large screen and, somewhat incongruously, a fashion show was taking place in one of the buildings. 

The following evening we went to Tante Käthe in the Mauerpark to watch England’s game against Iceland. This is another typical Berlin venue, home to a sausage and fish barbecue on Sundays and full of unexpected features such as the lily pond in the corner and blue plastic sheep on the porch. I felt so deflated by the Brexit vote that I had little enthusiasm for England and I actually cheered Iceland's victory, as someone behind remarked with grim irony on England's second European exit in four days. After the final whistle the  winning team’s flag was hoisted up a pole to accompanying music in a bizarre but quaint ceremony. 

 

Lily pond at Tante Käthe

 

 

Raising the Icelandic flag

For Wales’s game against Belgium we went to our friend Gareth’s in Pankow then we watched their semi-final against Portugal at Neue Heimat, one of my favourite Berlin venues. The indoor space had been filled with sand to create a beach full of deckchairs but we sat on the carpeted pallets around the edge. Tempted as I was to order one of the special ‘Brexit Mule’ cocktails from the bar, I judged it more prudent to stick to beer.

 

Neue Heimat shortly before the semi-final between Wales and Portugal

 

The following evening, we went off the beaten track for the semi-final between Germany and France, to the Gaststätte Birkenwäldchen at the Berlin-Chemie Adlershof Sport Verein.  This quirky ‘pub in the woods' was discovered by our friend Jon who has a flat in Adlershof and needed somewhere to drink after his previous local, the lovely ‘Leichenkeller’ closed. The Gaststätte is reached by turning off the market square in the old part of Adlershof and walking along the cobbled and wonderfully named ‘Genossenschaftstrasse’ until it peters out into the woods. Picking our way through the trees was fine on the way there but by the time the game had finished we had to rely on Jon’s torch as the woods aren’t lit.

 

The Gaststätte Birkenwäldchen  

 

Sadly, there won’t be any trophy-parading processions in Berlin this year and I’m guessing that the atmosphere on the ‘Fan Mile’ will be more subdued tomorrow than it was two years ago. I’m certainly not too bothered about the final so I’ve no plans to watch it anywhere yet, but that could change by tomorrow afternoon…

 

Annus Horribilis

A few weeks ago the language part of my course came to an end and I began the orientation module, a 60-hour programme devoted to German culture, the country’s legal and political structure, and German history from the rise of Nazism through to the end of the Cold War.

 

Part of the course involved a visit to the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Unter den Linden where we were given the task of locating particular exhibits and answering questions about them. In the section devoted to World War II I noticed an anti-Jewish propaganda poster from the 1930s.  I’ve seen such images before of course and felt thankful that such hatred was a thing of the past. Now though I’m not so certain, and seeing that poster I couldn’t help but recognise parallels with today’s political climate.  A few days before, UKIP had unveiled a Nazi-inspired poster, the purpose of which was to fuel hostility towards refugees and migrants. Later that day MP Jo Cox was murdered by a white supremacist shouting ‘Britain First’.  The following week Britain voted to leave the EU, not over concerns about TTIP or the EU’s pandering to capitalism, but because of racism and xenophobia.

I felt shell-shocked waking up at four on the morning of 24^th June and reading that Britain had voted ‘Leave’.  It seemed that overnight my position had shifted; I suddenly felt very sensitive about the fact that I was British. Travelling to the Volkshochschule on the tram later that morning I felt ashamed. I’m sickened that the victory was secured by the prejudices of the very worst elements of our society.  The kind of ‘proud’ Brits who, when in continental Europe like to assert their ‘superiority’ by singing about World Cups and World Wars and strutting around wearing England shirts as if the national team was actually something to boast about.  

The British media must take a large share of the blame for all of this, particularly papers such as the disgusting Daily Express with its alarmist anti-migrant headlines. I still can’t figure out exactly how front pages that shriek about migrants ‘stealing our jobs’ or bringing crime waves to the streets of Britain avoid charges of incitement to racial hatred.  The BBC too has played no small part, consistently referring to refugees as ‘migrants’ and providing a platform for nasty Nigel Farage to spout his repugnant views. Such exposure has resulted in Farage and his party being accorded undue respectability and has given a green light for racists to voice their ‘concerns’ about immigration whilst imagining that talk about ‘taking the country back’ does not constitute racism. (One thing I learnt within hours of the Brexit vote was that bigoted racists really don’t like to be called bigoted or racist).

Increasing support for far-right politics is not just a British phenomenon either; there is to be a second general election in a year in Austria because that country’s constitutional council nullified the result of the last one in which the far-right candidate was narrowly defeated.  Pegida and AfD are gaining in popularity as is the awful Marine Le Pen, and the USA is facing the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency.

It seems to me that the world is in self-destruct mode at the moment with all of the rights that have been secured over the course of the last century at risk of being lost.  Workers’ rights, gender equality, LGBT rights and protection for racial and religious groups – freedoms which were often achieved after great personal sacrifice – would all disappear should the far-right become politically powerful again.  And yet some actually want human rights legislation to be scrapped. Decency and tolerance are regarded with the utmost suspicion and, thanks to the Brexit vote, racist attacks have multiplied five-fold.    

It’s been a very difficult and depressing couple of weeks. Almost daily there has been a new cause for despair. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all a nightmare and I will wake up to find that it’s still 2015 and none of this year’s awfulness has happened.