Fashioning a New Brand of "Germanness": The 2006 World Cup and Beyond

Abstract

Fashioning a New Brand of "Germanness":The 2006 World Cup and Beyond Katrina Sark Since reunification, and particularly since the FIFA World Cup in Germany in 2006, Berlin city marketing, museum exhibitions, and displays of public art have all reflected a discourse on new national identity formations that previously could only be found in political media or academic discourses. Berlin's numerous marketing campaigns have restructured its image as an open city. Messages such as "be open, be free, be Berlin!" circulate throughout the city, encouraging its inhabitants and visitors to see Berlin in a new, creative, entrepreneurial, and liberal light. Leaving behind the negative stereotypes of its historical past, Berlin has been reinvented by politicians (Mayor Klaus Wowereit and the Berlin Senate), city planners, marketing strategists, filmmakers, and curators. Urban culture is in many ways propelled by public events and celebrations, like the 2006 FIFA World Cup or the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (the Mauerfall) in November 2009. Not only high culture was given a boost: in the months leading up to the Mauerfall anniversary, most museums, galleries, and exhibition facilities offered some kind of display or presentation on the theme of the Wall. At the same time, pop culture, music, film, and fashion also played an active role in the international spotlight. Berlin city planners and marketers know how to navigate and steer public consciousness. Personal histories of the Wall were collected and retold. Collective, self-reflexive, and cultural contemplations took place on widely engaging public levels - artists, writers, politicians, and regular people became involved in public debates and contributed their points of view on reunification. This article will examine this path of collective national and civic identity construction in different cultural and medial spheres by looking at exhibition practices and urban branding campaigns. During the 2006 World Cup, the question of what and who constituted the new (reunited) Germany had been posed to an unprecedented degree (since reunification) across all spectrums of discourses. An exhibition at the German Historical Museum displayed artefacts from 1,000 years of German history - similar to the "What Is German" exhibition at the German National Museum in Nürnberg. A display of public art dedicated to German achievements in the arts and science guided the tourists along the "Walk of Ideas" past all the main tourist sites in Berlin. All these exhibitions and practices addressing "Germanness" placed the question of national identity on display. A similar spur to public contemplation of national identity swirled around the [End Page 254] celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009. Events such as the U2 band's free concert at the Brandenburg Gate, various Wall-oriented exhibitions at almost all Berlin museums, film screenings, gallery exhibitions, art installations such as the Temporary Art Gallery at Schlossplatz in the shape of the former Palace of the Republic, and finally the spectacular fall of 1,000 domino pieces along the stretch of the former Wall from Potsdamer Platz to the Reichstag, all commemorated the beginning of a new chapter in German history. As studies on national identity and patriotism have shown, "the reunification of the two German States and the process of European integration into the European Union have given a new dimension to public discussions of German national identity" (Blank and Schmidt 289). Examining a variety of media discourses: authoritative and institutional, as well as journalistic discourses in the popular press, this article places the 2006 FIFA World Cup as a pivotal time in renegotiating Germany's public image. A first step is to differentiate between conceptions of national, social, and cultural identity. While national identity is usually tied to symbols of a particular nation that has been identified as an imagined community (Anderson 1991), social identity is a collective identity that can be tied to various societal subgroups within a national or transnational milieu. In the German context, the concept of cultural identity (tied to the term Kulturnation) is often prevalent because it allows for a collective identity to be based on shared values such as cultural heritage, language, and the literary, artistic, and scientific achievements of a nation (rather than militaristic nationalism). This...