The Economist: Survey of Germany

IF YOU are visiting Germany this spring, watch out for footballs. They are everywhere, on posters, buses or entire buildings, even though the World Cup which the country is due to host this summer is still four months off. A German firm is even wrapping the giant globe atop east Berlin's landmark television tower to make it look like a football. If marketing departments had the technology, a German daily recently joked, they would project a football on to the moon.

Nor is it just marketing people who are getting excited. For the duration of the tournament most German states will liberalise shopping hours, and the government is even thinking of deploying the army around stadiums for the first time in the Bundeswehr's history. Germans, it seems, are taking the World Cup extremely seriously—and not just because most of them are passionate football fans. “The last time the world paid so much attention to Germany was 16 years ago when the [Berlin]Wall came down,� says Angela Merkel, the country's new chancellor.

The hope is that a victory, or at least a respectable result, will help cure the collective depression that descended on Germany when the economy started to sag at the beginning of this decade—just as winning the 1954 World Cup, held in Switzerland, helped to heal the national psyche after the war and kicked off the Wirtschaftswunder (the post-war economic miracle). The Wunder von Bern, as the unexpected victory came to be known, helped to restore Germans' battered pride in their country.

cure the collective depression

written by one German journalist from the Berlin office of The Economist