Soccer and the Nobel Prize
By Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler
These days, Austrians are acting as if the only thing in their future were the European Soccer Championship this June. Forgotten are the problems every country on the conti-nent has with the EU. Europe includes all countries participating in the European Cham-pionship; the Russians and the Swiss can be part of it too. So can the Ukraine and Nor-way and Bosnia and even Israel - all of these countries fit under the hat of this Euro-pean Championship. Electronic display panels proclaim how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds remain till the kickoff of the first match. The end of the world predicted by a religious sect never attracted as much attention in the public consciousness. Even the very fragile coalition government wants to hold out until the European Championship, which suggests that soccer is the primary mover and politics only secondary. Intellectu-als of all stripes are being dragged in front of the microphone or television camera and asked their opinion on the European Championship. And they give it, and they publicly pledge allegiance to this sport. It's as if they had exchanged their heads for soccer balls. In the fifties, when I was in high school, this kind of thing would not have been possible. Soccer was a sport for the masses, and more sophisticated families wanted nothing to do with common folk. The only thing they knew about soccer was to look away.
Even the greatest triumph in Austria's soccer history couldn't change that. In 1954 in Switzerland, Austria came in third behind Germany and Hungary, the little Alpine repub-lic's favorite opponents. It only gradually became apparent that no sport was better suited than soccer for national identity and self-identity. The principle of the nation state is adopted everywhere, and in soccer you can celebrate self-worth like nowhere else. The World Championship in Germany in 2006 was supposed to show a new and differ-ent and above all a good and friendly Germany: not the land of poets and thinkers, nor even of judges and executioners, but at best of referees and playmakers. The Austrians now want to copy the Germans. That, too, is singular, considering that when it comes to culture Austria's citizens want to be decidedly different than their powerful neighbors.
These few observations demonstrate that soccer offers unequalled access to the social, mental, and cultural history of a country. But I'm not referring to the hype surrounding world championships and European championships, where the games themselves are ultimately an empty center surrounded by the hoopla of clamoring reporters and crazed fans. Laurence Sterne knew it: After all, the guiding principle of his novel Tristram Shandy is that it's not the things themselves that get us excited, but the things that hap-pen around them. It's a shame, because soccer is a nice game that consistently com-bines wit and physical skill, team spirit and individual performance. It also introduces a number of opportunities for reflection, inspiring us to think about fundamentally philoso-phical questions such as fate and chance, fortune and misfortune. The leather is round, reminding us of Fortuna dancing on a globe in the allegories. When the game's on, we're game - we identify with success and failures. There's always a piece of us out there on the turf. Sometimes it seems to have free will, another time we feel cheated by the refe-ree's whistle or the unpredictable path of the ball. After the game, the excitement is over. This is how catharsis must have exerted its effect through tragedy for the Greeks: we've lived through the strong affect and afterwards we feel redeemed. Others have fought a good or bad battle for us. Defeats and victories are equally effective in teaching us les-sons. Austria's national team, clearly leading in the first two thirds of the match against Germany, lost the last international game in Vienna. It was a perfect example of "glori-ous defeat" like the battles of Thermopylae, Amselfeld, and the Alamo.
Austria's literature would be all the poorer without soccer. In 1927 a twenty-two-year-old student of chemistry heard the screams from the soccer field of the Rapid Wien soccer club from his apartment high above the Wienfluss river. He wasn't interested in soccer, but still followed the "invisible match" with enthusiasm. "I was not party because I did not know the parties. All I knew was that there were two crowds that were equally excited and spoke the same language." For years, the author thought about the phenomenon of crowds, and more than thirty years later wrote a book that took the screams of the spec-tators as its starting point. It was published under the title Crowds and Power, and the author, Elias Canetti, received the Nobel Prize for it.
Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2004, lives on the other side of the river; in her play Sportstück (A Sports Piece, 1997), she, too, demonstrated her knowledge of sports and especially soccer.
The number of examples could be continued ad infinitum. All are proof that the excite-ment or joy that soccer can engender is very much capable of inspiring us to think and poetize.
Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler teaches German literature at the University of Vienna. He was the 2007 Scholar of the Year in Austria.
