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Foreword
When the European Football Championship was taking place in Sweden in 1992, the German weekly magazine Der Stern had this to say of the then manager of the German national team, Berti Vogts: “Discipline, order, punctuality—national trainer Berti Vogts leads his team in the tried and tested Teutonic tradition” (Der Stern, June 25, 1992, as cited in Holliday, Hyde, & Kullman, 2004, p. 128). In this apparently throwaway remark, made with unstated but absolute confidence that it would make obvious sense to his (probably “his” rather than “her”) readers, Der Stern’s journalist makes a number of remarkable claims: (1) There are a number of characteristics shared by Germans in general, and agreement about what they are is widespread enough for them to be listed without any need to argue for or offer evidence for their existence; (2) the German football team, consisting as it must of Germans, will naturally also share these characteristics; and (3) there is nothing particularly new about this “national” character—on the contrary, it stretches back into the mists of time, into the European Dark Ages of the first century AD when the Teutonic tribes were wandering around northern Europe. These characteristics, therefore, either are or are seen as elements of a Germanness that long predates the emergence of the modern German state, carried in the genes of “Germans” for the best part of 2 millennia.