German Soccer, the 2010 World Cup, and Multicultural Belonging

The celebrations of the “multicultural” German national soccer team for the 2010 World Cup and the subsequent declaration of the failure of German multiculturalism reveal complex constructions of national belonging and of postnational identity constructions, and affective ties to the idea of Europe in twenty-first century Germany. Within what appears to be an enthusiastic celebration of a multicultural German team, we uncover a set of converging emotions about what Germany and Europe stand for and what they could or should embody. Such contradictory discourses provide a fundamental tension that defines “feeling Germany” and “feeling Europe” in the first part of the twenty-first century.