Feature writer Helmut Böttiger once rhetorically asked: “What is a dramatic Shakespearian death compared with a decisive goal headed into the net in the 92nd minute?” And the Austrian literary scholar Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler struck a similar chord to express his enthusiasm for a game that has long since embraced all walks of life and genders, and replaced that age-old number one topic of endless conversation, the weather, saying: “Shame, revenge, coincidence, trickery, cunning, chivalry, virtue, spite, violence – this is the stuff of football matches and the great tragedies of world literature. (…) The difference is: I know how Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Lessing’s Minna will end, but I don’t know what the outcome of the next Derby between Rapid and Austria will be. The stadium unquestionably has the aesthetic and dramatic edge over the Vienna Burgtheater.”
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So that’s it – advanced civilization can pack up its bags and leave. Opera houses, museums and libraries need not necessarily be torn down, but they can just as well be boarded up, because after some three thousand years of intellectual history so-called educated circles have internalized the words of Sepp Herberger, the manager of the “heroes of Berne” that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent Dirk Schümer elevated to the rank of a philosopher equalling Heidegger, who once revealed to the world: “People go to the stadium, because they don’t know what the result will be.” Well, faced with such an argument, Goethe and Schopenhauer simply don’t stand a chance. They lack the mass attraction noted by our “Kaiser” Franz Beckenbauer, who has become remarkably taciturn of late. He hit the nail right on the head, when he said: “For instance, when I read someone like Schopenhauer, I just don’t understand him.”
Ninety years ago the poet Joachim Ringelnatz issued futile warnings against “football mania”. Laments, such as that of the linguist Florian Coulmas, vanished unheard into the “depths of space”, from whence the literary scholar Karl Heinz Bohrer saw the brilliant Günter Netzer emerging at Wembley Stadium in 1972. In the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung Coulmas wrote: “Today’s journalistic fraternity has the audacity to write about the ball, and those who maltreat it, as if human destiny itself were at stake. The football intellectuals are fanning the flames by lending this nonsense a semblance of respectability and restricting the football-free spaces more than ever. Why can’t at least the features section remain free of football?”
Because football is a unique phenomenon? A supreme wonder? A form of play that not only allows analogies between itself and great art, but downright forces them on the knowledgeable observer? And didn’t Eckhard Henscheid, writing in the 1980s, place “the pure beauty of a brilliant dribble, or a perfectly executed one-two pass, in the tradition and spirit of Immanuel Kant’s ‘disinterested aesthetic pleasure’”? Yes, he did. Then there was the sociologist Hartmut Esser who devoted his intellectual energies to the “one-two pass as a social system” and discovered that “one-two passes are (…) self-related and sovereign constructions”. Precisely. And consequently the one-two pass “is a process which, despite all cooperative and antagonistic episodes, simply continues as a process for as long as it lasts, but then it does this to the full.” But under one condition: “In order for a one-two pass to exist, it first has to be created.”
Whilst the Swiss writer Thomas Hürlimann is consumed by the idea that the ball symbolizes the unity of the female and male hemispheres that play an important role in Plato’s creation myth and the sociologist Gunter Gebauer, in his poetics of football, marvels at the accomplishment of taming a ball with the foot, poets such as Robert Gernhardt and Albert Ostermaier devote their attention to a specific type of player: the goalkeeper. They may well have been inspired by Sartre’s remarks on the “good goalkeeper” in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, where we read with amazement: he is good, “because he has saved his team on several occasions through individual actions, that is to say through exceeding his individual powers in an act of creativity”.
Mind you, Sartre did remember to add that football “does indeed become more complex through the presence of the opposing team”. This didn’t prevent the language philosopher and Habermas friend, Karl-Otto Apel, from happily explaining in a television show that the football is “luminous”, it radiates, glows, and takes possession of the soul – or something more or less to that effect. No, there’s nothing we can do about it. Football is now unavoidable, particularly for the reasonable human being. Football represents a synthesis of the stubborn individual and the team spirit. It is easy to grasp yet fascinatingly complex, it is a collection of routines yet brimming with breathtaking moments. The Stanford University professor of literature Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht explains that “a beautiful move…is the epiphany of a complex and embodied form”. Similarly, a rhyming poem is also a complex form. The most notable of football poets, Ror Wolf, ends his book Das nächste Spiel ist immer das schwerste (The next game is always the toughest) with the elegy “The Final Ball”, which admittedly rhymes in the original German: “Through the wind it flies and flies, / high, so high we see the smooth / ball softly sweep without a sound, / floodlit, and yet moonlight pale / the ball into the distance sails: / far remote from all we know.”
Jürgen Roth is a writer who specializes in satire and football. //
