By Brian Melican

World Cup 2006 in Berlin (Flickr: SpreePIX-Berlin)

Germans don’t do things by halves, especially where football is concerned. The “beautiful game” is something of a religion out here, and this makes the World Cup roughly equivalent to the Second Coming, or the Day of Reckoning – or whichever bit of biblical imagery you fancy. Anyone who experienced the 2006 World Cup in Germany certainly knows what I’m talking about.

And whether it’s just a fleeting football competition or Doomsday itself, Germans like to make sure that they decorate accordingly. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since we’re talking about the country that invented Christmas trees and, as far as I know, the only country where a majority of houses decorate for Easter. In short: if you’re talking religions and decorating, you’re talking German.

Amazingly, this optician is aiming to attract customers by putting a pink rubbish bin in his front window (Flickr: HamburgerJung)

Which is probably why so many German shops invest seemingly inordinate amounts of money in window decoration – after all, why else would serious establishments like pharmacists and opticians put on such lavish displays? This was a question that plagued me in my first months in Germany, and anyone with a working knowledge of German can see a video about it here.

Now, of course, I’m quite used to it, so the extent to which shops have now decorated for the World Cup – despite the fact that it is no longer being held in Germany – shouldn’t have caught me off guard. But it did. Because, when it comes to shop window decoration, Germans just don’t know when to say “when.”

Flickr: antenne

Let’s look at this first shop window, for example, in an upscale city-center shopping passage (marble flooring, air conditioning – pure class). The shop with this football-shaped table plus accoutrements has, that’s right, nothing whatsoever to do with sport, but that doesn’t stop the staff from feeling the need to adapt the display to the “WM,” as the World Cup is known here. There are plenty more otherwise dull organisations that seem to feel the need to liven up their image with World Cup window displays, with the Sparkasse bank splashing out on all kinds of football-related paraphernalia. I’d rather they spent the money on cutting my account fees, but, hey, whaddya gonna do? When in Rome…

Flickr: rrho

Having said that, that’s all relatively harmless (and financially unimportant) compared to the sheer visual-overload to be found on many suburban shopping streets. Nestled amongst scrappy kebab takeaways and a conspicuously large number of phone shops, this toy store has really gone overboard in terms of its World-Cup-related window decoration. Note, by the way, the Afro wig in the colours of the German flag nestling behind the teddy bear toward the right of the bottom of the display case: following on the biblical theme, one might call it a head-dress for the high priests of German football-mania.

And that, in turn, is completely harmless compared to what’s going on on Hamburg’s infamous Reeperbahn. Amongst other things, this half-mile strip is reputed for its numerous sex-shops selling every imaginable (and several unimaginable) kind(s) of sex aid – and it is by no means excluded from the German theme-decoration imperative. Lingerie, leather and other erotic equipment is all now available with either football prints or the black, red and gold of the German flag emblazened all over it.

There’s something very odd about national flags in the bedroom. I never found Geri Haliwell’s “iconic” Union Jack Dress particularly sexy – in fact, all I could think of was Queen Victoria’s famously prudish admonition to “lie back and think of England” during copulation with one’s spouse. In the same vein, I find it difficult to associate the German flag with fun in the bedroom.

"Schland! Schland!" (Flickr: der_dennis)

Which is a problem that German World Cup fans don’t seem to be having at all at the moment, judging by the proliferation of flags hanging out of bedroom windows and off bedroom balconies all over Germany. This is something of a novelty since the 2006 World Cup, up until which point flying the flag was taboo due to the role of nationalism in Germany’s complicated history. Since then, however, it’s become somewhat more acceptable to voice support for Germany, with some having taken to shouting “’Schland!”, an inarticulate, lower-class pronunciation of “Deutschland” comparable to the “In-ger-land” phenomenon amongst underprivileged football fans in Great Britain.

Nevertheless, Germans are far from being completely unironic about football and national identity, as a hugely-successful World-Cup-related parody of Lena Meyer-Landsrut’s Oslo hit “Satellite” shows. Conclusive proof, if any more was needed, that Germans liked to be dressed and decorated for every occasion.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pW_fJAiPx_w" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

(© Brian Melican, blog.young-germany.de)