IF THE GERMANS win Euro 2012, as is quite likely, it will be their seventh success in a European or World championship. They’ve been runners-up even more often. So you’d think the novelty of winning football games might be wearing off by now. But you’d be wrong.
En route back from Poland last weekend, the night Germany played Greece, I took a detour into Hanover. Like many of my stop-overs, it wasn’t entirely planned. I certainly didn’t mean to end up in the city centre – the last place you want to be with a camper van that has blinds spots the size of Volkswagens.
The original idea was to turn off the motorway just long enough to find an atmospheric-looking venue showing the game. But the empty roads lured me in. And 15 minutes later I was parking in a square beside the Rathaus.
From there, you didn’t have to ask directions. Such was the noise from the nearby “fan-zone” – one of the communal, open-air, big-screen football-viewing experiences that Germany itself patented for the 2006 World Cup – it was like the game was being played here and not in Gdansk.
And when the home team won, inevitable as that result seemed to us, the city erupted into the sort of party Dublin might have witnessed had we beaten Spain.
The celebrations made a deep impression on me because, having decided to check into a local hotel for the night, I had to move the van to a proper car-park. But in the process of finding the car-park and then discovering the van wouldn’t fit in it because of a height restriction, I got lost – yet again.
By which time, of course, the streets of Hanover were no longer empty.
On the contrary, the city was now in the grip of a mass cavalcade of flag-draped cars, punctuated by flag-draped (and beer-drinking) pedestrians, who were adding to the van’s blind spots by waving flags across the few bits of it I could see through.
The very worst thing about the cavalcade was the horns. You hear a lot of beeping horns when driving a camper van around Europe: usually directed at you, as you hold up traffic while studying maps or trying to think at road junctions.
And, sad to say, celebratory car-horns sound no different from angry ones. So if my nerves hadn’t been shot already by two weeks in Poland, the Hanover cavalcade would have done it.
Back at the hotel, eventually, I was rescued by the night manager, a young man called Kurt. First he gave me his own parking space, next to the front door. Then, over a beer in the bar (where he was pulling half-litres in between attending the front desk), he offered condolences on Ireland’s Euro performances.
Like many Germans we met, he told me Irish fans had made the TV news there, singing “that song” when 4-0 down against Spain. And I knew I was in good company when he added: “Oh well, you still have the Gaelic football and hurling to go back to.” It turned out he’d spent time in Dublin, studying business. But whether he’d learned it there or in Germany, he was everything you would want in a hotel manager, and a bit more. Hearing we had to check out very early, before the restaurant opened – the van had to be back at 9am, three hours drive away – he even undertook to make us a packed breakfast.
Thus we left at 5.45am with tea, coffee, sandwiches, and apples. And after they discovered that half the sandwiches were filled with cheese and ham, but the rest with chocolate spread, Kurt became a hero to my children too.
With people like him, and indeed with most of its fun-loving football fans, you’d wonder how certain negative stereotypes about Germans persist. But I think that, here as elsewhere on this still war-scarred continent, there are big generational differences.
When we stayed at a four-star campsite in Potsdam (they had showers for dogs that were more luxurious that some of the facilities returning Irish football supporters had become used to), for example, the guests seem to be composed entirely of grumpy old men and women.
Whereas, among the twentysomethings and thirtysomethings we met, joie de vivre – I don’t know if there’s a German term for that yet – appeared unconfined. No doubt some of it was due to the same footballers, who as a multi-racial and harmless expression of their country’s greatness, have become poster boys for a new generation.
On the train into Dusseldorf next day, after surrendering the van, I was stunned to see that most of the passengers were still in full celebratory mode. It was only lunch-time. But either this was the party from the night before, continuing, or it was a new one, starting early.
Either way, young men were openly swigging from beer bottles, while a couple of women sashayed around our carriage pouring champagne and tequila shots for their friends.
I had to remind myself that this was the economic powerhouse of Europe.
And I wondered whether, in a now-famous phrase, Angela Merkel thought they were at work. Then I realised it was Saturday.
So Germany’s finances were probably safe for another week. Besides which, when I got back to Dublin later that night, there was Mrs Merkel herself – pictured at the Greek game and now on the front page of The Irish Times – celebrating too.