The Last of the Ossis Michael Ballack and the very Idea of a “Fürhungsspieler”

Neuer, Lahm, Mertesacker, Boateng, Friedrich, Schweinsteiger, Özil, Khedira, Müller, Podolski, Klose. What might have sounded like a poem by the early Peter Handke - Ladies and Gentleman - is in fact the team line-up of the German national soccer team that beat Argentina 4:0 in the quarter finals of the 2010 South Africa World Cup. The victory marked the finest performance of a German squad since 1990 - the year the team clinched the title in Italy. The new German team of 2010 was hailed by fans and media all over the planet. No word of “panzers” or “robots” anymore, because these guys were different: young, cool, lively, innovative, joyful, elegant and, most importantly, “multi-cultural”, as a felt majority of the German players (or their parents) were born in countries like Tunisia, Brazil, Turkey, Ghana and Poland. None of the players on the pitch, however, had either been born in the former GDR or the “neue Bundesländer” (a post 1990 synonym for new federal countries in the East). In other words, just like the championship-team of 1990, the squad of 2010, representing a, the new Germany, was thoroughly “Ossiless”. But wait. What about Michael Ballack? Our beloved superstar, born 1976 in the Saxoninan town of Görlitz? Well yes, Ballack, the designated skipper, was also in the stadium on that fine day, standing on the sidelines in a black suite, limping, with crutches, cheering relentlessly for his team mates, and yet, one felt, he already anticipating the consequences of their stellar performance, namely, that his time as the unquestioned leader, the “Führungsspieler” of our soccer nation, had come to an end. After almost 20 years in the spotlight of the national media it was time for Ballack to pass the sceptre. Given the unmatched importance of the national team for the emotional well being of my country, such a power shift in “Die Mannschaft” is not to be taken lightly. It carries an enormous symbolic weight. Especially since Ballack is part of a long and venerable tradition of German world-class athletes who were – for the lack of a better term – products of the GDR-sports-system. Names like Katrin Krabbe, Jan Ullrich, Heike Drechsler, Franziska von Almsick, Matthias Sammer, Claudia Pechstein come to mind. All of whom, however, had retired by the summer of 2010 (or were forced to do so). Michael Ballack, who always speaks highly (if shyly) of his GDR-childhood and youth, started playing soccer in 1982, at the age of seven, at the BSG Motor Fritz Heckert in what was then called Karl-Marx-Stadt (today Chemnitz). Due to his undeniable gifts, he became soon part of the promotion system of the state. In the fall of 1989, thirteen years of age, he had joined the youth team of the then first league club FC Karl-Marx-Stadt and attended a special school for gifted young athletes, the Kinder- und Jugendsportschule Emil Wallner (were he graduated in 1993). On further reflection, Ballack has emerged not only as the most famous, the only truly global star of the generation that Robert Ide refers to in his aptly titled book “Geteilte Träume – Divided Dreams”, he, Ballack, is by 2010 also the last representative, the last member of a dying tribe of sportsmen and -women - the last of the “Ossis”. For an “Ossi” in the fullest and thereby always paternalistic sense of the word, he has always been, at least for us, the soccer fans from the West. The label stuck with him his entire career – just like (and possibly because of) his Saxonian accent. And when I referred to him “as …