Rock. Hard Place. Germany.

I will never forget the sunny evening of June 14, 2006. I sat in a café on Berlin’s Kurfuerstendamm watching Germany play Poland in a World Cup match in Dortmund: an intense, low-quality game. In injury time, Germany broke down the right and Oliver Neuville stabbed in the winning goal at the near post.

Chi-chi Ku’damm is hardly the beating heart of German football passion, yet even there the effect was astonishing. Crowds poured onto the streets. The traffic ground hopelessly to a halt. Beer cans flew through the air. Everywhere people were waving the black, red and gold of the German flag.

This would have been quite normal in any other country. In Germany it was historic. Mass displays of nationalism had been taboo there since the war. The West German education system trained students in what the thinker Jurgen Habermas called “Verfassungs-patriotismus” or “constitutional patriotism”, encouraging them to identify with the abstract ideals of liberal democracy rather than with old-fashioned national symbols like the flag.

All that had clearly gone out the window. I spoke to several dozen of the fans that night for a radio piece. What was curious about these drunken, emotional Germans is that they were all saying the same things, as though they’d read the same memo before joining the party. “We can wave our flag, we don’t have to be ashamed any more. We are not The Germans that you know from the past.”

Even at the time, it felt like something big was happening. German conservatives had pleaded for Germany to again become a “normal nation”. Now football had provided the catalyst for that change of consciousness to happen spontaneously. I put together some of the fans’ drunken ramblings to Diana Ross’s I’m Coming Out.

Six years later, the real significance of that World Cup in changing the way Germans feel about themselves is difficult to quantify, though it so happens that Germany’s foreign policy has become ever more assertive. In 2010, the Christian Democrat politician Josef Schlarmann advised Greece to sell some of its islands to help with its debt crisis. It’s hard to imagine a German politician offering such a suggestion in the days when Chancellor Willy Brandt was falling to his knees to beg forgiveness for wartime crimes.

The change in German football is easier to pinpoint. In 2000, Germany liberalised its nationality laws so that children of immigrants resident in Germany could become German citizens. This opened the way for players like Mesut Ozil, the German playmaker who previously could only have represented Turkey.

Second, the national team finished bottom of its group at Euro 2000, losing 3-0 to Portugal’s reserves in the process. This disgrace provoked anguish and outrage — had too much prosperity made German youth flabby and feeble? Crucially, it also prompted Germany’s FA to come up with a plan.

Within two years, youth football in Germany had been overhauled. Every Bundesliga club now had to run a centrally regulated academy. Each academy would have to include at least 12 German-qualified players in every year’s intake. Ten years later, Germany is producing super-talented footballers the way it produces industrial machinery. The Euro squad includes Mario Goetze, Andre Schuerrle, Lars Bender, Thomas Mueller, Marco Reus and Toni Kroos: all 23 or younger.

Meanwhile, the senior international side was going through its own transformation. Jurgen Klinsmann threw out traditions that had defined their national style for more than 30 years, abandoning the sweeper system for a flat back four and favouring frenetic pressing over old-school German patience.

When Joachim Löw succeeded Klinsmann in 2006, the change in tone became more pronounced. A fan of Paulo Coelho and self-help literature, Löw sought to imbue the side with a philosophy of “passionate optimism”. Where once the watchword had been kampfen (to struggle or fight), Löw talks earnestly in terms of spass und freude (fun and joy). The eight goals Germany smashed past England and Argentina at the 2010 World Cup seemed to confirm he was on the right track.

The team once seen as the bad guys in every tournament had become, according to Spiegel’s Alexander Osang, something light, non-ideological, dance-like, beautiful and joyful. German fans, ever conscious of the image of Germany abroad, have enjoyed the metamorphosis. They watch with their flags at massive public viewing events and the team gets larger TV viewing figures than ever before.

There is only one problem with the new Germany: they’ve forgotten how to win. They have failed to win the last five World Cups — the longest drought ever at that level. If they don’t win Euro 2012 it will be the longest they have gone without winning the European Championships.

Löw commands the high ground but there are some voices wondering whether, in the rush to embrace the new, German football has forgotten some of the warrior ethos that made it exceptional in the past. Nice young men playing fast two-touch football, winning points for style yet never coming home with the cup. It all sounds a bit, well... Dutch.

The doubts were articulated by FC Bayern’s president Uli Hoeness in the aftermath of hi side’s Champions League final defeat to Chelsea. “Do we have the players who really force the issue?... I didn’t see a Jens Jeremies today, a guy who bites opponents in the calf on the way on to the pitch.”

Germany lost in the last two tournaments to Spain, who were clearly more talented. When the old Germany came up against more talented opponents, they still found a way to win, beating Hungary in 1954, Holland in 1974, France in 1982.

These victories didn’t make Germany popular around the world.

But when you represent the richest and most powerful nation in debt-ravaged Europe, maybe it’s silly to hope you can become everyone’s second-favourite team. Winning has always been the cardinal virtue of German football. If Löw’s team doesn’t win the final in Kiev, Germans will start to wonder if the old ways weren’t the best.