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Das Wunder von Bern – German Football Legend
By Christoph Sedlag | August 12, 2008
It was the best German film of the past year – Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) (Germany, 2003). And not just for audiences who like sports. For soccer fans, however, an absolute must! This is the story of Helmut Rahn, the lad from the industrial Ruhr who scored that winning goal in the final match of the 1954 World Cup in Bern.
And it should be noted too that Jahn – indeed, a legend as a soccer player, if there ever was one – passed away shortly after the film’s release. The Miracle of Bern is also the story of a father, Richard Lubanski (Peter Lohmeyer), who has just returned home for a Soviet POW labor camp. A broken man, he is not even sure if 11-year-old Matthias Lubanski (Louis Klamroth), an ardent fan of Helmut Rahn (Sascha Göpel), is really his own son.
Last, but not least, this is also the story of Paul Ackermann (Lukas Gregorowicz), a young Munich sports writer, recently married, who has been assigned to cover the World Cup. He is accompanied to Bern by his reluctant wife Annette (Katharina Wackernagel), who once again has had to put off the promised honeymoon trip for a game she hardly understands. But once she watches a few games, and witnesses trainer Sepp Herberger (Peter Franke) in action as a father-figure as well as a soccer coach, she – like thousands of fans at home before their TV sets, catches the bug. Right when it counts the most, in the fever of the moment, Annette sparks the crowd in the stands to cheer the German eleven on to victory over an Hungarian team that hadn’t lost a key competition match in over two years.
Every German soccer fan is familiar with those immortal words spoken by trainer Sepp Herberger at a critical moment during a press conference before the final game: “The ball is round, and the game lasts 90 minutes.” Sönke Wortmann puts those words first in the mouth of a cleaning woman at the Swiss hotel where the team is quartered. Another happenstance is added on for good measure – the strong possibility that the German team had been greatly benefitted by so-called “Fritz Walter Wetter” – a rain shower that fell on the pitch during the entire match to accommodate the team captain, Fritz Walter (Knut Hartwig), thus slowing down the attack of the Hungarian team. And the presence of young Matthias on the sidelines during the final minutes, when Helmut Rahn scored the winning goal in the hard fought 3-2 match. Throughout the film we are reminded that whenever Matthias is present as a team mascot, then Rahn rises to the occasion to lead his team to victory.
How Matthias gets to witness “the miracle at Bern” is resolved by the stubborn father’s change of heart at the moment when it counts the most to keep the family together. He borrows an old jalopy from a miner friend and the pair cross the Alps just as the game is starting. They hear on the radio has Hungary has scored the first two goals in the first half, only to see the German team fight back to even the score by half-time. At this point in the story, of course, Sönke Wortmann pulls out all the stops. A filmmaker with a solid reputation as a soccer player before opting for the director’s chair, Wortmann reconstructed the playoff game down to the last detail. Most important of all, his actors are not only familiar with the game, but they play their roles before the camera like sport as well as screen professionals. When the two teams exit from the tunnel to begin the match, we feel like a documentary newsreels has come to life.
The year 1954 is also recreated with the same care for historical detail. The knickers worn by the boys at their own neighborhood soccer games are right out to family photo-albums. So too the stitched-together leather ball that passes for the real thing on a makeship back lot pitch. The same goes for the dress-styles and hair-dos worn by mothers and daughters to fit community occasions. Also, the carrier pigeons and the rabbits – as much part of Matthias’s life as soccer games – are depicted as facts of life rather than historical fantasy – indeed, the movie fits the times like a glove. The working man at the local tavern also looks every bit as though the war has taken its toll, although hope is shining in their eyes as the German boys qualify for the World Cup matches – and then inch their way to the finals after recovering from a humiliating 8-3 defeat to the Hungarians along the way.
Sound familiar? Yes, you are right. Das Wunder von Bern is not just about a World Cup victory in 1954. It’s also a metaphor for the Wirtschaftswunder – the economic miracle of the mid-1950s, when Germany pulled itself up by the bootstraps to become a key player again on the European stage. Congratulations, Sönke. You’ve made a film that not only stands for an entire decade but will also surely be seen for decades to come.
– Christoph Sedlag
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