Gregor Peter Schmitz about Franz Beckenbauer and the current star

Editorial

In the corridors and in the archives star-Editorial staff stock many famous images. They have been taken by famous photographers, many of whom you can recognize straight away. One thing in particular stuck with me: it shows two men in the shower, they laugh and move so confidently in front of the lens, even without clothes, that you feel like they are lucky children. They are: Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer.

Pelé was probably the most famous Brazilian of all time. For a long time, Franz Beckenbauer was perhaps the most famous German. “Was”. We just have to get used to it.

Beckenbauer revolutionized the game that is most important to Germans, football. A free spirit who did things that no one else did, especially because no one could do them the way he did, describes: “With incredible lightness and nonchalance, he dismantled the cliché of the always brave but rarely virtuoso German football player. The Teutonic football icons were more chummy guys like Fritz Walter or Uwe Seeler. They worked hard and rolled up their sleeves and played for a club all their lives and lived in modest houses with ornamental gardens. Beckenbauer was different. He played intuitively. And lived intuitively. He was ahead of his time. He ran upright, straight as a rod, rarely looking at the ball. He flicked passes from his ankle so beautifully, so precisely and seemingly effortlessly. He elevated football to the status of art, and even people who had nothing, “I understood absolutely nothing about this game and recognized its unique elegance and magic. His game never smelled of sweat and work.”

That was new and revolutionary, especially in Germany. On the other hand: Franz Beckenbauer, born just months after the end of the war, also seemed like the Federal Republic, says Streck: “He symbolized the passage of time in the Bonn Republic. The modesty and bourgeoisness of the post-war era, then the economic miracleland, the hedonism of the late 60s and the 1960s 70s, the rapid prosperity, but also the greed.” Streck writes that Beckenbauer played a large part in the fact that first the perception of football and then football itself shifted – from the sport of the proletariat to the middle of society. And in Beckenbauer’s case all the way up to the posh.

There will hardly be another emperor

And yet this lucky man was also broken in the end, embittered by the accusations about a summer fairy tale he had supposedly bought. This isn’t supposed to be about apologizing for possible wrongdoing, but somehow it seems very German that so much happiness in one person is not tolerated.

The national team is once again rumbling along, there will hardly be another emperor, although no one knows exactly how the honorary name actually came about. It just fit.

Streck ends his obituary like this: “In recent years he lived very secludedly in Salzburg with his third wife Heidi; he was hardly seen in his native Munich anymore. But Franz Anton Beckenbauer never forgot his roots and his beginnings. He bought the apartment at some point of his childhood on Zugspitzstrasse in Giesing, upstairs on the fourth floor, view of the football field below. The doorbell says: Kaiser.”

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