A bit of psychobabble, and mistakenly ascribing certain universal traits specifically to the Germans, and failure to recognize natural-born talent or to understand that some "acquired" talents can be even more impressive than anything native, but there are insights to be found here, not least of which is how unsuited Steffi was to being a German popular heroine -- or how unsuited the Germans were to have a popular heroine like Steffi.
Fitness Fanatics - Michael Schumacher
The Times
London, England
Saturday, October 28, 1995
Roger Boyes
QUIET, PLEASE! If you please... Juergen Dilk is very insistent. As president of the First Official Michael Schumacher Fan Club he carries a certain weight. "Over the past three days," he announces over the crackling microphone, "you have guzzled exactly 5,990 litres of beer." A pause. "And I want to say this: I'm proud of you all!" The fans bang their fists and heavy glasses on the trestle tables. A youth in a baseball cap waves a yellow banner embroidered with the German eagle, the German national colours and in a diagonal strip: SCHUMACHER.
It has been a good season for Schumacher fans. Their idol has just picked up the world championship again, and after every race the German driver comes to the fans' tent, eats sausage and yells: "I love you all!" Late at night, after Schumacher has gone to bed, they talk about difficult bends, about the cursed Damon Hill and, at last, they break into song.
Schumacher is the latest in a string of German sports heroes who have made it acceptable to shout in public: "Stuff the English! Crush them!" National sentiments have been buried so deeply for so long that nobody knows how to release them safely. Sports stars help to make German chauvinism respectable - and harmless. Perhaps that is why the tabloid press insists on calling them Schummi (Schumacher), Franzi (van Almsick), Klinsi (Klinsmann) and Steffi (Graf), as if they were favourite teddy bears or a troupe of performing poodles.
They are a strange, brittle bunch, the Schummis and Steffis. Distant yet intimately known, too-good-to-be-true but constantly brushed by scandal, they are Germany's complex new heroes. Indeed, they are the country's only heroes. For five decades Germans have been brought up in a hero-free zone. "This was the direct result of our fractured history," says sociology professor Volker Rittner of the Sports Academy in Cologne. The evil of the Nazi era could, in one way or another, be traced back to a misplaced sense of German heroism: the idea of the master race, the cult of the Fuehrer, the propaganda imagery, the manipulation of Nietzsche's "superman" philosophy and praise of "glorious blond beast thirsting for victory".
Postwar Germany tried to banish heroism; political charisma was suspect. In the words of the critic Ulrich Sonneman, Germans have transformed themselves from beasts of prey "into ants, the very model of industriousness". Plainly, there could be no war heroes in postwar Germany. One searches in vain for a Rommelplatz or Rommelstrasse, and it is difficult even to find traces of Prussian generals such as Gebhard Bluecher, who came to Wellington's rescue at Waterloo. The German army, as it prepares for its first postwar military missions abroad, is trying to dig out acceptable war heroes to inspire the troops, but again and again they stumble into trouble.
There is pressure to rename barracks dedicated to Wehrmacht generals and there is confused controversy on many other fronts. Social Democrats, for example, are insisting that army deserters were the true heroes of the Nazi era. It is impossible, in short, for Germans to mimic the British with their regimental colours, neatly sewn with battle honours, or to put up statues to the German equivalent of Admiral Nelson. Some of Germany's greatest triumphs were over France, but it is politically incorrect to remind young Germans of the fact. Victory on the battlefield has become a source of deep shame; films are made only about great defeats, such as Stalingrad.
"It is a similar story across the board. There is political talent, genius even, but no room for charismatic heroes. Indeed, the most successful German politicians such as Helmut Kohl deliberately emphasise their provincial roots and ordinary lifestyle. Chancellor Kohl certainly eats like a hero, but he rules like an investment fund manager, buying and selling policies. There are no German Richard Bransons, no German Mick Jaggers. Often pop stars, aware of the essential contradiction between Germanness and public charisma, take on English-sounding names: a German singer called Roy Black is mourned as deeply as Elvis in some parts of Germany. "There is this fundamental problem, a trend in many post-industrial societies," says Professor Rittner. "It is becoming more and more difficult to produce heroes, yet the need to identify with exceptional individuals is stronger than ever." The influence of organised religion is receding, but the Germans in particular seem to have a longing to express their feelings en masse, in a semi-religious way. Spontaneous candle-lit processions against racism, or nationwide protests - all this is in the realm of what Rittner calls "irrational identification". But there are no outstanding individuals to give voice to protest, to act as a beacon.
AND SO THESE SPORTS STARS have come to fill the vacuum. Can they really satisfy the many demands and expectations that are being piled on them? Are they destined to buckle and break? In Germany, as in the rest of Europe and the United States, there is a modern cult of physical fitness. "This is connected with the decline of religion and with changing attitudes to work," says Rittner. "To assert yourself in the world you have to have an appropriately fit-looking body, and the body itself becomes a God, a symbol of earthly happiness." In Germany, participating in sports is a way of breaking down the very high social barriers. In a squash game with a virtual stranger, one can address him by the informal "du" - a rather intimate form that is virtually barred at the workplace. "Social distance is closer when you face body stress together," says Rittner, "and mutual admiration of sports heroes brings you even closer together."
The first German sports hero after the war was the soccer player Fritz Walter. A bank clerk who had played for Kaiserslautern before the war, Walter fought in the German army and spent years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. He resumed his soccer career after the war and in 1954 captained the German team that captured the world championship with a 3-2 win over Hungary. This unleashed a wave of national pride, suppressed for the previous nine years. Some historians believe the German national mood changed as a result of the match (dubbed "the miracle of Berne"). Sports heroes in those days were usually straightforward working-class boys. The virtues of sporting success were also the classic German virtues in the postwar order: work hard, keep personal discipline, live modestly and you can achieve a certain nobility at a time when Germany was still regarded as an occupied and beaten country with moral bills to pay.
Schumacher and Graf are the modern heirs to the Walter tradition. Like Walter, Schumacher comes from a working-class background. His parents run a go-karting centre in Kerpen, not far from Cologne. Like Walter, the racing driver is always clean-shaven, ostentatiously polite (except to Damon Hill) and discreet. In August, after playing cat and mouse with the paparazzi photographers, he married his longstanding girlfriend Corinna, who in a soft light could pass for Claudia Schiffer's sister.
Off the track no whiff of scandal attaches to Schumacher. Perhaps in quiet rivalry with Damon Hill, he has taken on more charity work. Willi Weber, Schumacher's marketing manager, was once reported as saying that his charge was "Goethe, Mozart and Einstein wrapped into one". Asked to confirm this statement, Weber said: "No, I didn't mention Goethe."
Schumacher plainly does possess a kind of genius; when you travel at 200km an hour your brain has to process hundreds of different signals in a thousandth of a second. But it is genius born mainly of discipline. From the age of ten Schumacher was obsessed by go-karting, but he was not allowed to race seriously because he was too young. On wet weekends when his father's track was almost empty, he would plead for a drive. As the water gushed down - the Rhineland is famous for its heavy rains - and the track became more slippery, Schumacher would play with a go-kart, making improvised 360-degree turns. At 15 he was the national junior go-karting champion; at 18 he was European champion. The rain practice served him well when he moved into Formula One racing - his first grand prix title came in Spa in 1992, on a drenched course. Is that genius or singleminded discipline? In Germany the distinction is academic - genius and discipline belong together.
Graf's background is more prosperous, as befits a tennis player who had to be coached from an early age. But her virtues are those of Schumacher, and she has been part of the sporting pantheon for far longer. To Germans, Graf is a model of hard work, combative spirit and niceness. She conforms, in short, to the self-image of most working-class Germans. She may lack humour and off-court grace, but she is an example of how the classic German virtues can bring recognition and financial reward. A Berlin mother trying to rouse her teenage daughter in the morning will say: "If you get up early and organise your time properly, you can be just like Steffi."
That formula may be working rather less successfully nowadays. Graf's father, Peter, has been in remand prison since August, her tax accountant has been arrested and her bank documents searched by detectives. She has come under almost unbearable pressure that may mark the beginning of the end of her career. Prosecutors believe that sponsorship money has been diverted to Dutch accounts to dodge the German taxman. Graf has been interrogated, Opel has ended its sponsorship contract and the tax affair has even become the subject of a parliamentary investigation commission. The latest opinion poll shows that 48 per cent of Germans believe Steffi's image to have been severely damaged. "I don't believe the survey," says Rittner. "The need for a popular heroine is simply too big to be shattered by a case of tax evasion."
Nonetheless, the Graf case does show how burdened Germany's sports stars have become. Since they are no longer merely successful athletes but rather national icons, they are expected to have views on everything, yet be uncontroversial and supra-political. They lead, follow and prod the public consciousness.
Long before the tax affair blew up, Graf was in trouble of a different kind. More than any other player on the international circuit, she is the object of fascination for the psychologically unhinged. Her postbag is bursting with strange attestations of love. "It is something to do with her Germanness, her apparent innocence and evident worldliness," says psychoanalyst Bernd Schubert. The knife attack on Monica Seles was prompted by a mad love for the German player. Graf, the perfect German girl, had to be number one.
The latest to crumple under the pressure of Germany's high expectations is the 17-year-old swimmer Franziska van Almsick, who confessed recently to reading Mein Kampf (a banned book in Germany) and who concluded that Hitler was "quite clever". She later claimed to have been misinterpreted: "I am simply interested in German history, and the Second World War belongs to Adolf Hitler. It's not forbidden to be interested in such things."
This was a reasonable enough defence, but it was made in the context of a tearful week in which her political views somehow tangled with her mixed success in the swimming pool. Unlike Graf, Franzi's main sponsors did not withdraw at the first flicker of crisis. She can still be seen advertising milk chocolates and German cars. But Franzi and Steffi nowadays seem to be teetering on the brink of nervous breakdowns. They are happy to be loved, are mature enough to accept occasional sporting setbacks, but the expectations of the nation, expressed at their crudest in newspaper headlines, are proving too much. "Why can't they find somebody else to hound and let me get on with my tennis?" Graf told a friend recently. But she was missing the point: there is nobody else.
German demands on their heroes and heroines are shifting, however. "There is a notable trend towards the rebel, the bad boy who can subsequently be forgiven," says Rittner. These are the heroes with edge and attitude who tell referees to shut up or who break their rackets. In the United States, bad boys have long ago been accepted as entertainers: John McEnroe was the pioneer. They are on the same spectrum as rock stars, who are expected, as a matter of form, to destroy hotel suites since this act establishes their unruly genius. Slowly Germans have come to acknowledge Boris Becker as a bad-boy hero. The mass circulation Bild newspaper has been battering him for years, complaining about his form, his politics and his haircut. Now even the tabloid press is beginning to admit that Becker is not part of the clean-cut picture gallery that stretches from Walter to Schumacher. Becker publicly sympathises with long-haired squatters in Hamburg, speaks out against German racism - and has a black wife - and tells interviewers that his secret dream is to be a taxi driver in Brooklyn. Becker as a star divides Germans into those who love him and those who hate him; in that sense, he is a modern hero. The Germans are starting to differentiate. Not everybody has to conform to the pattern of Siegfried the dragon slayer.
It is a realisation that comes from outside. Hollywood showed Germans that they could lay claim to a war hero: Oskar Schindler, a gambler and cheat, who gambled and cheated to save Jewish lives. Bad men, it seemed, can do good things; good men can do bad. Schindler is still an uneasy presence. Many Germans have still not made up their minds about the man. But the nature of heroism is certainly changing in Germany. It is certainly inconceivable, of course, that Graf could suddenly become a female version of Becker. Whatever her problems, she will remain in the world of robotic, or at least docile, heroines.
Schumacher, however, is busily transforming himself into the Becker of the racetrack. True, he is still Mr Nice Guy posing with his West Highland terrier (blond) and the wife (blonde), adjusting the set of his chin for the cameras and stressing to interviewers that he bears no one in the world any ill will. But the long duel this season with Damon Hill has made people think twice about Schumacher. There is the nagging question of all competing athletes: can you be nice and be a winner?
Schumacher certainly discarded some of the cosy trappings on the track this season. There was the riddle of how Schumacher swiftly lost a stone in weight at a critical point in the championship. And the on-track tactics have begun to look very dubious: overtaking Hill on a warm-up lap, ignoring a black flag, the pushing and the shoving, much of it directed at his English rival.
Schumacher explains this all away as a clutch of misunderstandings, but that is not the whole story. First, he has learnt a trick or two from Ayrton Senna, a particularly tough driver who often used bullying tactics on the racetrack (indeed, Senna died while attempting to stay ahead of Schumacher). Second, there is something in Schumacher, behind the courteous off-track manner, that irritates many of his fellow drivers. A German sports reporter told me, with the air of a dissident passing on samizdat: "Germans will understand next season that this has not been purely a Hill versus Schumacher thing. It is a Schumacher problem - there is something about him that makes people want to jump at his throat."
A rare insight. But where does it leave the ace driver? Schumacher is in transit. Perhaps one day soon we will hear his views on European monetary union or Bosnia; perhaps he will start to smash up restaurants and swear at judges. When he changes teams, from Benetton to Ferrari, perhaps he will change colour, tone and mood and join the bad guy brigade. For the time being, though, he remains his mother's pride: a true German hero. One of the few.