Euro 2024 the most politicised major football tournament in living memory
TURKISH DELIGHT: Merih Demiral of Turkiye celebrates scoring his team's first goal during the UEFA EURO 2024 round of 16 match. (Photo by Lars Baron/Getty Images)
Outside Leipzig’s Forum of Contemporary History no one is in a hurry. It’s hump day, no need to be hurdling it. Inside the museum, which charts German separation, life and resistance in the East and reunification, nobody’s rushing either. But one person’s stride through the strasse out front does catch the eye.
Jahrhundertschritt or The Step of the Century is a sculpture by Wolfgang Mattheuer, seen as one of the most seminal works of East German art. It stops you in your own slow Wednesday tracks, this bronze figure striving forward with its bare right leg, dragged back with a military uniformed and booted left, the right arm raised in Nazi-ish salute, the left flexed with a closed Communist fist, the head and centre mostly missing.
