Jürgen Klinsmann, Euro 96 and their Impact on British Perceptions of Germany and the Germans

Abstract

The Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz, who did his bit for Britain indirectly by taking part in a rearguard action to keep reinforcements from reaching Napoleon at Waterloo, defined war famously as ‘eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln’ [’nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means’] in his seminal work Vom Kriege. But already in Clausewitz’s day, a connection between war and sport was being drawn, though not because (in the language of soccer) Field Marshal Blücher and his Prussians had turned up at Waterloo like some match-winning Continental ‘super sub’, and on our side. Another notable participant at Waterloo, none other than the Duke of Wellington, is reported to have claimed that the battle was won on the playing fields of Eton. Old Etonian George Orwell agreed in his essay ‘England your England’ (1941) that this probably was the case, but added that ‘the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there’. In so saying, Orwell was highlighting what he perceived to be the ‘decay of ability in the ruling class’,¹ but he was also betraying his dislike of sport, which he described just a few years later in the essay ‘The sporting spirit’ as ‘an unfailing cause of ill-will’. Indeed, he came close to paraphrasing Clausewitz in implying that sport was war by other means when he wrote: ‘At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare’ and also asserted:

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.