“My ambition was football” – Franz Beckenbauer (September 11, 1945 to January 7, 2024)
I was so tired because Bobby Charlton was chasing me around the pitch for a hundred and twenty minutes that I didn’t even care.
Franz Beckenbauer on the third goal in the 1966 World Cup final
*
Paul Breitner
*
In the 10s I wrote several elaborate audio pictures about political rhetoric in the Federal Republic. Although the Internet was already overflowing with original sounds, there was only one way I could get to the real rarities: I went to the German Broadcasting Archive on the grounds of Hessian radio and was incredibly lucky to meet an extremely friendly and well-disposed archivist who fulfilled my every wish and exploited the immense sources available there for me.
Hardly to my astonishment, he complained that the editors of the HR made no use of the enormous treasure. The broadcasters of today’s generation are lazy, intellectually mindless and not at all interested in the history of their medium.
This accusation can be made by Philipp Grüll and Christoph Nahr, the authors of the documentary “Beckenbauer” (BR 2024, in the ARD-Media library), don’t do it. They have recovered wonderful material: one of the chaste interviews at the time, which in this case the great Rudi Michel conducted with Franz Beckenbauer and in which the genius on the pitch, blown over from a strange other dimension, Schlaks confessed that autograph requests were “just a nuisance” to him; or pictures of the audience in the stands of the Munich Olympic Stadium, where meter-long cigars were smoked during the World Cup final; or countless tactfully edited stills that convey a feeling for the almost ethereal body and ball control of the Giesingen worker boy.
And the moment I put a period after the third paragraph of this text, it calls to me jW-Editor Merg on January 8th: “Two minutes ago the ‘Tagesschau’ reported that Franz Beckenbauer had died.”
What now? Throw away the suddenly completely inappropriate, narcissistic introduction that I found so clever? Rethink everything and start again? I don’t have the nerve for it.
I’ll try it this way: I’ll of course leave out the bad jokes about Franz Beckenbauer’s date of birth, September 11th (he shared it with Adorno) (the experts know which statement by football official Franz Beckenbauer I was alluding to). And should I ignore the references to Franz Beckenbauer’s constitutional discontent, which his companions mentioned several times in the film, to his ostentatious lack of interest and insensitivity, his aloofness, which his brother Walter speaks about in a touching way?
I didn’t do this.
Franz Beckenbauer, the child of the Munich proletariat, once described himself as a Buddhist. And one of his unintentionally artful, most honest sentences was: “When I read a Schopenhauer, for example – I don’t understand him.”
Perhaps there was a dark urge within him for education, for something else, for the higher class. He went to the opera and at the same time said: “My ambition was football.”
I had written down: “It consists of blank spaces.” Such a statement is presumptuous. But what can you honestly say about someone with whom you have never once exchanged a few words?
He was quick-tempered. He was charming, a lover of women, an obviously stunning guy. He was a libertarian, baseless boy in a mischievous, likeable way and the first PR model, the first capitalist icon in football history, a product who, created by his manager Robert Schwan, accepted being a product. One huge contradiction – the way people are. And so, with a crime of taste (“No one can separate good friends”), in the dawning age of cultural industry simulation, you knock out the real giants: “He was in the hit parade before the Beatles.” (Herbert Jung, Bild)
He had charisma, says my father. Yes. Charisma, which is literally a gift from God. We don’t know any more. And we don’t even know that.
The famous dancer on the square, elegant, flawless, graceful, graceful. He lacked the power, the truly brawny and at the same time teasing impetuosity of his buddy Pelé, who named him the best of all time. Franz Beckenbauer dabbed the ball here and there, and yet he could hit and shoot from distance like few others. You can watch on YouTube what long-range grenades he fired at the 1966 World Cup in England, at the age of twenty-one, after zigzag runs across half the field, as Lothar Matthäus most recently did against Yugoslavia in 1990.
“He doesn’t sweat,” notes Harald Schmidt in “Beckenbauer.” In the same vein, the former federal outsider jockey swamp head only emits bumbling nonsense (“The very young Franz Beckenbauer – that’s where it all began for him”; Otto Schily is, it should be noted, just as stupid: “Franz Beckenbauer has developed enormous charisma”; well, that explains something).
Günter Netzer comes closer to a secret that would no longer be a secret: »Franz Beckenbauer was able to protect himself very much during his time. He stood back there and let the others run and fight. And we had the trouble. And he was the shining light back there and celebrated it. Very, very smart.”
No. Not smart, not “clever”, maybe. Rather guileless, popularly naive – and therefore seducable, habitually corrupt, ambitious, ruthless he may have been (I suspect). And nevertheless: a sense of freedom, in my opinion, combined with arrogance. But just the absence of the fighting on the plain gives birth to art. If you listen to Franz Beckenbauer’s brother Walter, a fragile mosaic of a person comes together who was hopefully (and there are a number of things against it) partly unavailable.
“This is how the good Lord imagined the world” (Franz Beckenbauer on the 2006 World Cup he bought). The leather balls that he kissed with the pike imagined the world as he created it on the pitch, and they, the balls, understood themselves as perceived. That remains, and that’s all I can say.
