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Chancellor-in-waiting Angela Merkel heads the field in Bundesdance 2005, presented by Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Note a tiny Jens Lehmann in blue, in front of the Allianz Arena.

On the cover of Havemann's book, German players give the stiff-armed salute before a 1941 match against Sweden in Stockholm.

Andrei Markovits, professor of comparative politics and German studies at the University of Michigan and co-author of Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, goes further. By dint of a prevailing conservatism that had banned English terms such as "corner kick" and "touchline," German football authorities, according to Markovits, integrated seamlessly with the Nazi program. "[I]n Nazism, the DFB found a good ally, a soulful affinity" (Jack Bell, "German Federation Admits to Nazi Past," New York Times, 20 September). Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger, in his 2002 book, Tor! The Story of German Football, already had found evidence supporting such conclusions. In the chapter titled "Angst and Anschluss: Football under the Nazis," Hesse-Lichtenberger writes that as early as April 1933 football authorities pronounced in kicker that "members of the Jewish race, and persons who have turned out to be followers of the Marxist movement, are deemed unacceptable" (80). The Nazification of German football clubs thus preceded by several weeks the official government order to expel Jews from welfare organizations, youth groups and sporting clubs. German international Julius Hirsch, a longtime member of FV Karlsruhe, and thousands of other Jews were forced to leave their clubs. Hirsch ultimately was murdered at Auschwitz. Sepp Herberger, manager of the side that defeated Hungary in the 1954 World Cup final—what Markovits calls "the most important event in Germany becoming the Federal Republic" and depicted in Das Wunder von Bern—also had ties to the Nazi past, but his ultimate allegiance seems unclear in Hesse-Lichtenberger's account.

In an incredible happenstance before the G-8 summit last year in Sea Island, Georgia, Schröder stumbles upon a group of kids with some footballs on an airport tarmac. A perfect opportunity to juggle. (Haraz Ghanbari | AP)

Moving forward rapidly to the present angst-ridden period—"Everyone is afraid" is how one Munich resident described the pre-election feeling (James Meek, "Berlin Blues," The Guardian, 15 September)—political realities suggest a period of Margaret Thatcher–style benefit-cutting. Unemployment in the unified republic stands at 11.5 percent (20 percent in eastern Germany). Population growth is 0 percent. Economic growth, similarly, is stagnant. In football, one team from the former East Germany, Hansa Rostock, remains in the Bundesliga's top flight. "Football has thus become a metaphor for the failure of the united Germany," writes the Times of London's Owen Slot ("East Germans Try to Arrest Decline by Bringing Back Player Production Line," 16 September). "[E]ast cannot match west economically and its football clubs cannot match up either." Football proved of no help to Schröder. (Covering all bases, Schröder is said to support three clubs: the working-class Borussia Dortmund, his hometown Hanover 96 and FC Cottbus from the east.) Plans to hold the election in September 2006, in the glow of a successful World Cup, went awry when events forced the polling forward by one year. Manager of the German national team, Jürgen Klinsmann, finds himself cast about, too, by uncertainties resulting from changes he has brought to the side: a different training regimen and his own decision to run much of team business from his home outside Los Angeles (see Rob Hughes, "The Big Interview: Jürgen Klinsmann," The Sunday Times [U.K.], 2 October). He has been summoned to an emergency meeting with the Bundesliga president the weekend of 22–23 October. He will be called to account.

London, 5 August 2005 | Violence and sport continue as a brew enchanting would-be terrorists and, now, an epistolary novelist. Chris Cleave's Incendiary, which takes the form of a bereaved widow's letters to Osama bin Laden, was published on 7 July.

The book by Adam Robinson includes details on bin Laden's football-viewing habits. It is said he made four visits to Highbury in 1994.

In a horrible coincidence, the date was that of the terror attacks on the London Underground. The book's premise is an attack on Arsenal's new Emirates Stadium during a pivotal match with Chelsea. A nameless narrator, a woman from Bethnal Green, loses her husband and son and begins her letter-writing campaign. Cleave renders the prose in what more than one reviewer describes as "faux-naïf." From the narrator's opening missive:

They say you believe that if your people kill anyone innocent then you're doing them a favour because they will go to be with Allah. I wouldn't know about that. My husband didn't believe in Allah he believed in his kid and Arsenal football club. I always liked the football but my husband and my boy were mad for it. My husband used to take the boy to all the home games. The fun used to start the night before. Before we put the boy to bed my husband would run around the flat with the boy on his shoulders. They would sing 1 NIL TO THE ARSENAL till the upstairs neighbours banged on the ceiling. They were Chelsea fans upstairs.

The narrator continues:

You live in the mountains with your Kalashnikov Osama sending god's fiery vengeance down on the heads of the prophet's enemies so you might think football isn't that important. Well it is. . . . You think you've seen jihad Osama but I'm telling you you haven't seen anything till you've seen what happens if they let Arsenal and Chelsea fans mix going into a game.

Curiously, the narrator seems blissfully unaware that bin Laden—according to Adam Robinson's book Terror on the Pitch: How Bin Laden Targeted Beckham and the England Football Team (Mainstream, 2002)—is, or was, an Arsenal supporter, an attachment developed during his London residency in the early 1990s. Simon Kuper of the Financial Times calls Robinson's book "curiously ignored" ("Terrorists Take Aim for the Global Audience," 8 July), as it details the foiled al-Qaeda plot to kill England players and fans at the first-round England–Tunisia match in the 1998 World Cup finals. (Kuper also documents bin Laden's Arsenal ties in "The World's Game Is Not Just a Game," New York Times Magazine, 26 May 2002, 36–39.) The failure of the operation allegedly led to a subsequent al-Qaeda attack on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Kuper quotes U.S. government agent Louis Mizell as having tallied 171 terrorist attacks on sporting events since 1972. Arsenal now have officially banned bin Laden from the grounds ("Fanatical about Football," BBC Sport, 11 November 2001), and we doubt that the old chant is still in use:

He's hiding near Kabul
He loves the Arsenal
Osama
Oh oh oh oh!

Three recent issues of 11Freunde, Hard gras and Le cahiers du football.

London, 8 May 2005 | Fourteen of the Observer Sport Monthly's top-50 sports books relate to football, yet only one makes the top 10. Three of the top 10 concern boxing, with cricket (2),

J. L. Carr's work is "written in the style of an official history . . . by the club secretary."

horse racing (1), bicycling (1), rugby (1) and baseball (1) rounding out the rest. Number 1, unsurprisingly, is Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, which continues to find life as a bastardized Hollywood production in which the Boston Red Sox stand in for Arsenal (see 23 April for more on Hornby's latest work). Just two woman authors make the top 50: Laura Hillenbrand and Seabiscuit at no. 4 and Joan Ryan with Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, concerning the politics of gymnastics and figure skating (no. 40). The most intriguing football entry, to us, is How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup (1975), by James Lloyd Carr, which is ranked 16th. Carr, school headmaster, map publisher and former amateur footballer, began a career as novelist in his 50s and wrote eight books, including the well-known Month in the Country. D. J. Taylor describes Sinderby as "a dazzling version of the time-honoured fantasy in which a village side goes on an unfettered rampage of giant-killing. Here the stimulus is a displaced Hungarian academic who, having made a scientific study of the game, devises 'seven postulations' for success."

London, 23 April 2005 | A long Guardian profile of Nick Hornby applies an interesting new hermeneutic to Fever Pitch (Simon Hattenstone, "Laughing All the Way to the Cemetery"). Read

Hornby's new book will be released in May. The Guardian calls it "a suicide romp."

against Hornby's expanding oeuvre—including High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to Be Good and now A Long Way Down—we now, according to Hattenstone, can read the 1992 account of Hornby's Arsenal love affair as one man's struggle "with depression, under-achieving and not belonging." Hornby says that Fever Pitch was born from encounters with his psychotherapist. In the awkward silences beginning each session, Hornby would fill the void with football results. But Hornby "began to think of Arsenal as a metaphor for his life: boring, boring Arsenal (as they had been for decades), the chippy underachievers, so hard to love because they played such unattractive football." Yet though Hornby's recent book project concerns suicide, life is looking up: Arsenal are playing well and Hornby has two new sons. He characterizes his mood as "a sort of strain of English miserablism, where you know everything is crap and everyone who pretends it isn't is kidding themselves. Yeah, this is the best it will ever get."

Update: Hornby reads a children's story on the 26 August 2005 edition of This American Life (the reading begins at about the 32-minute mark). The story, to be included in a collection benefiting 826NYC—a nonprofit teaching creative and expository writing—concerns a nation so small that it consists of a soccer pitch, school and some dwellings. The measure of patriotism is taken by one's willingness to compete for the national football team against San Marino, Andorra and the Vatican.