Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [34]
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CAREFUL WITH THAT DU, DIETER!
It’s definitely not a good idea to use the familiar du form with the police – this could land you in court. In one bizarre case, the German pop singer and music producer Dieter Bohlen was charged with offensive behaviour when he used the familiar form with a police officer after being approached about a parking offence. The judge let Bohlen off the hook because ‘du’ is part of his style. Impolite, yes; offensive, no.
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In 2009 the German under 21 national team defeated England 4–0 in the European Championship final, led by trainer Horst Hrubesch (b 1951) and an exciting new generation of German players, of the likes of Gonzalo Castro (b 1987), Sami Khedira (b 1987) and Mesut Özil (b 1988). The names tell part of the story: the vast majority of this German U21 team had a migrant background, and many are set to become part of the next generation of the German national A-team. If all goes to plan, Germany can look optimistically into the future, and Hrubesch’s success and popularity with the young players may well make him a future candidate for the trainer position with the national A-team.
Women’s football is growing in popularity, partly because of the success of the women’s national team. Along with the USA, Germany has won the title twice to date. In 2011 Germany will host the FIFA Women’s World Cup (www.fifa.com/womensworldcup), with games to be played in Augsburg, Berlin, Bochum, Dresden, Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Moenchengladbach, Sinsheim and Wolfsburg. All going according to plan, this might be a summer football party just as enjoyable as the men’s Summer Fairy Tale of 2006.
Friday-night, Saturday and Sunday games are televised live on pay TV at sports bars all over Germany, whereas round-ups of the weekend matches are broadcast on the Sportschau on ARD (German National TV Consortium; Click here) around 6pm on Saturday and Sunday. German national team matches and UEFA Europa League matches are broadcast on free-to-air TV, as well as some UEFA Champions League matches.
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When Berlin football club Hertha BSC played a UEFA Europa League home match against Istanbul’s Galatasaray in 2008 in Berlin, 60,000 spectators tuned up. Around 40,000 of these were Germans or German residents with an ethnic Turkish background.
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Tennis
Tennis was a minor sport in Germany until 1985 when the unseeded 17-year-old Boris Becker (b 1967), from Leimen near Heidelberg, became Wimbledon’s youngest-ever men’s singles champion. Suddenly every German kid aspired to be the next Boris Becker. The red-headed mentor went on to win five more grand-slam titles in his career.
Becker was as colourful off the court as he was on it. His ‘affair’ in a broom closet with a Russian model in a London hotel in the mid-1990s produced a daughter and newspaper headlines that claimed ‘sperm theft’, while his tragic – and not surprising, given the broom-closet drama – marital breakdown culminated in a humiliating televised courtroom drama. His fiercest German opponent during the early 1990s (and fellow Wimbledon champion) was Michael Stich (b 1968); since their departure, however, the popularity of tennis has plunged.
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For a cracking read about football, the great football rivalry between England and Germany, and that famous match in 1966 with the controversial Wembley Goal, delve into Geoff Hurst’s 1966 and All That.
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Only the lingering, warm afterglow of Mannheim-born Steffi Graf (b 1969) currently lights the tennis darkness. Graf is among the few women to win all four grand-slam events in one year, and in 1988 – after also winning gold in Seoul at the Olympic Games – she became the only player ever to win the ‘golden slam’. Germans had always secretly hoped for a Boris-Steffi marriage that might have produced a Teutonic tennis wunderkind. For better or worse,