European Films

Sports movies are usually about underdogs winning against all odds; a classic example is the recent Oscar nominated film Seabiscuit, about a jockey too big on a horse too small. The German Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) is slightly different: The game to be won is the 1954 Football World Championship, the team to root for is the West-German mannschaft and the protagonist of the movie is an 11-year-old boy called Mattes (Louis Klamroth). Obviously, Mattes is not part of the team; instead he is the personal mascot of player Helmut Rahn (Sascha Göpel), proudly carrying his bag to and from practice. Rahn has told the little one that he cannot win unless Mattes is present at the game.

 

Football is Mattes’ pride and joy, as at home things are rather difficult. His family lives in the industrial mining Ruhr area, where mother Christa (an exceptional Johanna Gastdorf) has raised three children on her own, her husband Richard being a prisoner of war in Russia, detained after World War Two ended. He is finally released in 1954 and returns home, not knowing how to deal with a family that has learned to get on without him. Around the same time that father Richard returns, Helmut Rahn is selected for the West-German team to participate in the world championship in Switzerland. Mattes is obviously worried; if Helmut can only win the game with Mattes at the sidelines, how will the German team win in Switzerland if Mattes is at home?

Director Sönke Wortmann used to be a professional football-player himself, and his love for the sport shows in the lovingly shot football sequences, with the Big Game, the finale against Hungary in the pouring rain, particularly imaginative. The script, by the director and Rochus Hahn, takes the real-life events of the 1954 world championship and uses it as a symbol of hope for a still ravaged post-war Germany. The story of Mattes’ family is fictional, though it symbolises the state of many German families struggling to get back to normality even ten years after the war's end. One character, watching the big finale on TV,remarks “We have lost the war and we will loose this match too”; he will be proven wrong by history and this film.  

 

There is a beautifully written sequence in which father Richard pours his heart out to little Mattes, following the advice of the local parish priest. He openly speaks about his experiences as a prisoner of war, and the time seems tocome to a stand-still as his daughter and wife, in the next room, overhear the
conversation and are visibly moved. Unfortunately, not the entire film retains this quality of writing, with some sequences being rather perfunctory. There is a story-line following a reporter and his wife who attend the championship in Switzerland that never seems to go anywhere. There is no real emotion or drama in their story, nor is it played as straight comedy. The two-hour film could have benefited from cutting this story entirely and thus bringing down the running-length to a more sustainable one-and-a-half hours.

Nevertheless, the story is a powerful one, and the standard feel-good sentiment of winning the big game is amplified ingeniously to represent the sentiment of an entire people. At the end, it is not really the players we identify with, but rather Mattes and his family, and through them an entire nation that tries to rebound from years of war and poverty and finally experiences something of hope and a perhaps the beginning of the feeling of being proud to be a German again.

 

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