Friendly folk, but don’t mention the war

THE GERMAN girl in Frankfurt was a real pro, not even bothering to look me in the eye as she deftly slid a hand down the inside of my thigh.

But it’s alright, mammy, it wasn’t an occasion of sin. This particular fraulein was on security detail outside the England-Paraguay game and only began her thorough check of my person having first politely enquired: “May I now make body control?” Well, put like that, how could I possibly refuse?

Her approach pretty much sums up Germany’s friendly but formal attitude to the hordes of visitors in the country for the World Cup. Some unnecessarily lengthy queuing to gain access to the stadia notwithstanding, we in the media can certainly have few complaints about the pleasant efficiency with which the country has set about hosting the greatest sports show on earth.

Suddenly laid flat out by a pesky bug on Thursday, I had to forego the pleasures of a trip to Nuremberg for the England-Trinidad game. Since FIFA are, understandably, clamping down on media no-shows for games, I made sure to go online to cancel my seat in the press box. However, a gremlin in the computer works repeatedly prevented me from completing the process at a critical point and so, as instructed by the strict guidelines, I decided to put a call through to the ticket hotline.

Not that I was feeling too optimistic. Anyone who has ever rung the train timetable for Dublin to Cork will know what terrific fun it can be to get locked into a circular debate with an answering machine. (“I’m sorry, I did not understand what you said. Please repeat your destination”. Jeez, it’s bad enough speaking to an android, but when the bugger starts criticising your elocution…).

However, an astonishing sequence of events unfolded when I rang the World Cup ticket hotline.

1. The phone was answered on the second ring. 2. The woman answering was entirely human. 3. Assuring me that everything would be alright — even stopping just short, I felt, of singing ‘Don’t worry, be happy — she tried to guide me step by step through the online process and, when that failed again, took my number and promised to phone me back (yeah, right).

4 Three minutes later she did indeed ring back and between us we solved the problem.

In fact, we got on so famously that we have scheduled a romantic dinner for two on the night of the final in Berlin, followed by a relaxing fortnight in the Bavarian Alps. Meanwhile, CIE timetable man, with whom I have had a long-standing relationship, doesn’t write, he doesn’t phone…

Just occasionally, however, you get the sense that, as a visitor, you can be given too much of the soft soap treatment. On the morning of the Italy-Ghana game in Hanover, myself and a colleague found ourselves with a couple of hours free before catching the express train from the soaring new Hautbanhof in Berlin. Just outside the station was an open top bus offering a 90 minute tour of the city – it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up on an all too brief visit to what was once the most famously divided city in the world, as well as the scene of the final agonising death throes of the Third Reich.

Now, it wasn’t as if we were demanding a body count or anything as gory as that, but our resolutely upbeat guide proved to be much more successful than Basil Fawlty at not mentioning the war. Instead, his travelogue had all the edgy hard news content of an article in Hello. “Now, if you look to your right, you will see the American Embassy. Here in Berlin, we have more than 130 embassies. Now, if you look to your left, you will see a five star hotel, where you can even make jogging on the roof.”

Turning one corner, I spotted a street sign which indicated that we were now on Stauffenbergstrasse; here, surely, was an irresistible cue to at least name-check the eponymous German officer who had tried to blow up Hitler. But no, our man instead blithely pointed our bus full of Brazil and Croatian supporters in the direction of another entirely unremarkable building. “Here is our Arts and Crafts Museum,” he trilled and, then barely concealing the rising edge of excitement in his voice, added proudly: “This week, it is holding a wonderful porcelain exhibition.”

The whole experience was like being given a tour of Dublin which majors on the Luas, Temple Bar and Lillie’s Bordello, and describes the GPO only as a place where the citizens of Dublin buy their stamps.

Still, not even our irritatingly chirpy host could dodge the tumultuous events of 1989, especially since, at one point, our tour bus trundled alongside one of the few short stretches of the Berlin Wall still left intact in the city centre – elsewhere, the only sign that it ever existed is an eerie double line of cobblestones tracing its original path. Yet, for the first time visitor on a short hop, it’s almost impossible to grasp the enormity of what happened here – Checkpoint Charlie is now a Disney-style tourist attraction complete with a fake US guard post and guard. (“He will wave to us,” promised our bus man. Mercifully, he didn’t).

Of course, more time would have permitted visits to some of the reputedly excellent museums which detail the extraordinarily painful and heroic history of Berlin. Or, as an alternative, you could read ‘Stasiland’, Anna Funder’s brilliant and devastating account of life behind the Wall.

For me, the most original insight came from the taxi driver who brought me to the station when I was leaving Berlin on the next leg of my World Cup tour. One of that new global generation of senior citizen hippies, he looked about 70 but still had the mandatory round glasses, pony tail and beard – all that was missing, to my disappointment, was a ‘Nuclear? Nein Danke!’ sticker on his cab. But he was fine company and a fund of information about the changed city, including the revelation that he’d once carried a passenger who had owned the only hotel in the otherwise desolate no-man’s land of Potsdamerplatz. After years of scraping by, and with business bottoming out, he finally caved in and sold it off at knockdown price – exactly six months before the wall came down. Now, Potsdamerplatz is rapidly becoming a mini-Manhattan, boasting some of the most expensive real estate in Europe.

Inevitably, I had to ask my driver where he was on the night the wall cracked, thinking he had the look of a man who would have been first to the top with a little hammer and possibly a Tibetan hat. He grinned sheepishly and admitted that, having failed to get further than 200 metres in the gridlocked traffic, he simply gave up and went home and watched it all on the telly, just like the rest of us.

I kind of know how he feels. Covering this World Cup on the ground is exhilarating if exhausting – but, as you race from city to city, you’re always haunted by the notion that the folks back home have the best overview of all.

Ah, but that’s the meeja for you – never happy unless they have something to whinge about. The truth is that it’s a privilege to be here, even if, at my current lodgings in Heidelberg, they seemed taken aback by the idea that someone whose country has not qualified for the tournament could be over here on World Cup business.

At least that’s what I concluded from the check-in form they asked me to complete. Under the name ‘Mackey, Liam’, it read, ‘Nationality: Iran, Islamic Republic Of’.

“No, not yet,” I quipped good-naturedly.