When the German national team meets the Dutch Elftal in football, there is always a touch of extra tension about the game. And the roots of this very special rivalry are actually deeper than you might think – and go far beyond sports.
“I love Super Skunk and I love Sause speciaal. But there’s one thing, I’m meganational. It’s come over the years and now it’s pretty stuck. As long as it’s about football, I hate Holland like the plague.” Götz Widmann from the band “Joint Venture” once summed up the special love-hate relationship between the German and Dutch football nations with these lines. It is an extraordinary relationship that is passed down from generation to generation, but is probably past its most intense phases. But with this particular rivalry, you never really know.
Children born in the 1970s still remember a classic joke to this day. At least every time we visited our neighbors, he had to be recited: “Dad, why do Dutch children actually have such big ears?” “That’s because, my boy, their fathers always lifted the little ones at the border by their ears into the air to the east and said: Look, the world champion lives over there!”
“Real feelings of hate”
And in fact, the final of the 1974 World Cup was a real blow to the neck for several generations of Dutch people. The goalkeeper of the victorious European Championship team in 1988, Hans van Breuckelen, once described his memories of the 1974 World Cup after Elftal’s semi-final win against Germany: “I was 17 at the time and sat in front of the tube wrapped in my orange shirt. I still remember it well “How sick I felt after the game.” So it’s no wonder that his colleague and current bond coach Ronald Koeman was inspired to demonstratively wipe his butt with Olaf Thon’s swapped jersey after the 1988 game in Hamburg’s Volksparkstadion. “Real feelings of hatred” drove him that emotional evening, he later said.
“Vengeance at last!” wrote the “De Telegraaf” at the time – and thus recalled the disgrace of 1974. “These Germans can never beat us,” said the later Bundesliga coach and then player Arie Haan before the final in Munich – and thus expressed a feeling that the German national player Bernd Hölzenbein described it as follows after the final: “We decided to look them in the eyes and show that we were just as tall as them. They had the feeling that they were unbeatable – you could see it in the way they looked . Their attitude towards us was: By how many goals do you want to lose today, boys.”
“Don’t always hit the bone”
The fact that it didn’t happen that way was due to one person in particular – Berti Vogts – as the Swedish newspaper “Aftonbladet” wrote after the final: “The living lawnmower Vogts achieved the impossible and threw Cruyff off balance.” The great Dutch national player is said to have complained to Vogts himself after just seven minutes in the final: “Play football, don’t always hit the bone.” But the German “lawnmower” just replied with a shrug: “I’m sorry. I can’t hold you any other way!” The fact that Johan Cruyff wasn’t quite as fit that day was due to another delicate story that had to do with “champagne, naked girls and a cool bath” – and that added fuel to the fire of this special relationship.
In fact, it would be fair to say that from the very beginning the rivalry was conducted somewhat more bitterly on the Dutch side than on the German side. And that mainly had something to do with the period of German occupation in the Second World War. When the Wehrmacht finally had to leave the country, quite a few German soldiers stole the nearest two-wheeler. From this, the catchphrase for Germans who behave too insensitively in their own country has been preserved to this day: “Give me back my bike.” And when the neighbors met the hosts in the semi-finals of the European Championships in Germany in 1988, there were banners hanging in the Volksparkstadion that said: “Grandma, we found your bike!”
“Watch out, they’ll do it again”
The Dutch referee Frans Derks once described how deep these wartime roots lie, who was influenced by his father’s accounts of this time. And so the former UEFA referee once told the following story: “When my father died, I promised him two things shortly before his death: firstly, I will never go to Germany just for pleasure. And secondly: under my leadership, a German will become Never win the club. I stuck to that. When we talk about Germany, we are also talking about a people that produced people like Goethe and Schiller. But after years of study, I can give you one piece of advice: Be careful, because they will do it again!
Before the European Cup game between Katowice and 1. FC Köln, I visited Auschwitz. Afterwards I was completely out of control and didn’t really feel like refereeing a game anymore. The only thing I could do was not let the Moffenverein win. In the end it was a draw. After the final whistle they were still happy with me. You have to imagine that: I also left a good impression on the assholes!”
Stasi doesn’t know Neeskens
- Ben Redelings is a best-selling author and comedian from the Ruhr area.
His current work is “The new book of football sayings” with well over 10,000 sayings from the colorful world of football.
He travels all over Germany with his football programs. Information & dates www.scudetto.de.
It is a story that shows how intense this sporting rivalry was and probably still is in parts due to our shared history. But in addition to all the discord, the admiration and mutual respect have always been high – as a small anecdote about Johan Neeskens, who recently died unexpectedly, shows. The GDR national player Gerd Kische was one day supposed to be recruited by the Stasi, but refused the pressing advances. However, they still entered a possible code name in his file: “IM Neesken.”
When Stasi employees asked Kische one day what name he wanted to be called and which footballer he admired, he said: “Johan Neeskens.” The Stasi probably forgot the “s” in his name as IM back then. They probably simply weren’t football fans, Gerd Kische once said – and was still happy that he was allowed to be on the pitch with his Dutch idol at the 1974 World Cup. And that is also part of German-Dutch football relations. A conciliatory one at that.