A Uniter Not a Divider
When Michael Ballack arrived here as a 7-year-old soccer prodigy in 1983, with East Germany entering its dying years, the city was named Karl-Marx-Stadt. Eventually, Ballack moved into an apartment built for socialist privilege, with hot running water and central heating.
Sixteen years after German unification, the apartment block where Ballack lived is crumbling, half empty and scheduled for demolition, residents said. Ballack is long gone, his early promise having blossomed into the role of captain of the German national team, which faces Argentina in the World Cup quarterfinals Friday in Berlin.
That such visible figures as Ballack and Chancellor Angela Merkel are eastern German suggests both how far the country has come in uniting and how far it has to go before the so-called wall in the head of identity politics disappears like the Berlin Wall, academics and soccer experts said.
To many Germans, Ballack, soon to be 30, is simply an outstanding midfielder, deft with both feet and his head, adept at attacking and defending, perhaps the only truly elite player on the national Mannschaft, which the German team is known as.
For others, who consider the former East-West divide, Ballack is more complicated: His socialist upbringing has either made him ideal to marshal the collective aspirations of a team or left him lacking the individual assertiveness required of a leader. He is either selfless or egotistical, a consummate professional or a mercenary too interested in money. He recently signed for a reported $11 million a year to join Chelsea, the English club champion, after the World Cup.
At least everyone can agree that with his dark hair, firm jaw and thick 6-foot-2 physique, Ballack is handsome in a romance-novel kind of way. He is so important as a player that when he missed the World Cup opener with a strained muscle, his injury was reported in the news media as 'the country's calf muscle.'
'This is a sign of progress,' Pierre Gottschlich, a political scientist at the University of Rostock, said of Ballack. 'Think about it as a game played on certain levels. We've gone from the first level, where everybody thinks of him as East German, to the second level, where some see him as East German and others don't, and we're getting to the next level, where it doesn't matter at all. Probably in another 10 or 20 years, we'll get there.'
In a sense, Ballack is a human kaleidoscope, his personality shaped and reshaped by perceptions that seem to fall roughly along geographic and generational lines.
Particularly for western Germans, it does not appear to matter much that Ballack is from eastern Germany. Many of those interviewed said they did not know or did not care. After all, the Berlin Wall has been down for 17 years.
Dieter Jütting, a sociologist and a soccer expert at the University of Münster, noted that three others on the World Cup roster were eastern Germans; that starting forwards Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski were born in Poland; and that Coach Jürgen Klinsmann lived in Southern California.
'Football is a global sport,' Jütting said. 'Any connection to hometown or village -- there is no more connection.'
In Chemnitz and elsewhere in eastern Germany, though, the connection to Ballack seems to matter a great deal for many. Part of it is pride in a local boy who made good. But the appreciation for Ballack also seems related to the difficult transition many eastern Germans have experienced since unification and to a much-discussed nostalgia about old times in the east, known as ostalgie.
A huge bust of Karl Marx still sits in the center of this former industrial city, which was renamed Chemnitz in 1990. Downtown has been renovated but has a somewhat empty feel. Chemnitz, population 244,496, faces the same problems as many eastern cities -- unemployment at 20 percent and a loss of 20 percent of its residents since unification in 1990.
'For the self-confidence of eastern Germans, which doesn't exist, it is quite important' that Ballack succeeded at a high level, said Joachim Müller, 53, coach of the F.C. Chemnitzer soccer club and one of Ballack's youth coaches. 'He grew up here and was educated here and he made it.'
Beate Neuss, a professor of international politics at the Technical University of Chemnitz, said that eastern Germans were regularly told by the Party of Democratic Socialism, the former communists, that unification made them second-class citizens.
'It's good to have someone on top,' Neuss said of Ballack and Merkel, the chancellor.
Yet sometimes a soccer player is only a soccer player. As Ben Heber, a 14-year-old decathlete, trained Tuesday at the same Chemnitz sports club that produced Ballack, he said of Ballack's eastern heritage: 'We were born after reunification. It doesn't matter at all.'
Heber wore a hat of the English soccer team, and said he liked Ballack because 'he is the German Beckham.'
Ballack's view of himself in the context of East and West is seldom expressed, German reporters said. He did say recently to Neues Deutschland, formerly the communist party's official newspaper, that he saw no nationalistic danger in the flag-waving and joyful patriotism that has accompanied Germany's advance to the World Cup quarterfinals.
'In the host country, it has to be this way,' Ballack said.
He is among the last generation of athletes trained in the highly efficient East German system, which was based on sports schools and was focused mainly on Olympic sports for propaganda reasons. A country of 16.7 million challenged the United States and the Soviet Union for supremacy in winning gold medals.
And though East Germany's Olympic achievements have been largely discredited in the West because of state-sponsored doping, many eastern Germans view sport as having provided validity to the former communist state. Its greatest soccer victory came in a 1-0 defeat of West Germany, the eventual champion, during the 1974 World Cup.
Ballack 'is our brother,' said Dieter Gog, 66, a retired teacher from the eastern city of Fürstenwalde. 'In East Germany, industry was not so good. For the world, East Germany had sportsmen.'
Since East Germany's dissolution, many eastern soccer clubs have struggled to remain competitive, given a lack of financing, corporate sponsorship and management skills in the chaotic switch to capitalism. Last season, no eastern teams participated in the top flight of the German Bundesliga (although Cottbus has won promotion for next season). Promising eastern players are often snapped up by richer western clubs as teenagers, coaches said.
The perennial champion among East German clubs, Dynamo Berlin -- which was supported by the Stasi, or secret police, and was reviled for manipulating the outcome of games -- sank so low after the Wall fell that it resorted to selling microwave ovens and scooters to earn cash, according to news accounts.
By 1997, Ballack had left Chemnitz, where he had been sent to train as a boy from his hometown of Görlitz. He signed with the western German club Kaiserslautern and eventually went to Bayern Munich, where he won three Bundesliga titles over the past four years.
At the 2002 World Cup, Ballack led an unspectacular German team to the final, where it lost to Brazil, 2-0. His goal on a header eliminated the United States, 1-0, in the quarterfinals, and he committed a necessary foul to preserve a semifinal victory against South Korea, even though he drew a second yellow card and disqualification from the final.
For some, this notion of placing the team above himself is rooted in Ballack's socialist upbringing and makes him a perfect captain of the national team.
'They were trained not to have strong egos,' said Gunter Gebauer, a philosopher and soccer expert at the Free University of Berlin. 'He leads by his actions; he is not the boss. That is a Western idea.'
Yet after Germany had a disastrous performance at the 2004 European Championships in Portugal, some German reporters questioned whether Ballack's eastern background left him with enough individuality to be a leader.
'They argued that he doesn't have the competitiveness that it takes, that he doesn't have that certain profile a leader needs,' Gottschlich, the Rostock professor, said. 'But that was a discussion in the media, not much with fans. It died out within a couple of weeks.'
Bruised feelings emerged again this spring, while Ballack's transfer from Bayern Munich to Chelsea was being negotiated. Uli Hoeness, Bayern's general manger, said Ballack was interested only in his bank account. Franz Beckenbauer, Germany's soccer icon, accused Ballack of 'not even trying' in Bundesliga games.
All will be forgiven, of course, if Ballack and Germany win the World Cup and gain redemption from 2002.
'This would be very important for our country' in light of its economic malaise and struggles with reunification, said Neuss, the Chemnitz professor. 'We've had a depressed mood in Germany. If Ballack can score the decisive goal in the final, that would really be good for Germany unity.'
SOCCER