Weltmeisterschaft Fieber!

Arriving late in the afternoon in Nürnberg, we checked into our hotel and headed into the Altstadt for a look around and something to eat. Going by the Maxtor and then the old early 14th century city wall segment, you enter Nürnberg’s Altstadt which I remembered as lovely from last summer's visit. It still is, and on we walked to the Hauptmarkt square. Turning a final corner, we were there. But, instead of the immaculately clean platz of my memory, with the central iconic object the famous Schönne Brunne (Beautiful Fountain), we were faced instead with a square littered with trash and dominated by der Fussball-Globus!

Der Fussball-Globus, a gigantic, plastic, building-sized, soccer ball weighing in at an impressive 80 tons. Der Globus is touring German cities that will, next summer, host games of the 2006 Weltmeisterschaft. It had recently been trucked in from Berlin where it had added to the splendor of the Brandenberger Tor and the Reichstag. People can enter the Fussball-Globus (we won’t go into the possible Freudian dimensions of this activity) and, I understand that there are soccer-related things to see and learn in there, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The trash was apparently the flotsam and jetsam remaining from a concert or gathering of some sort that had taken place in the square that afternoon. My prediction that the square would return to its normally, Germanically clean state by morning proved correct. However, the Globus remained and will stay there, fronting the Marienkirche until September 4.

Before leaving the Fussball-Globus for dinner, one of my students more observant than her professor, pointed out that on the outside of the ball—was in fact, a globe--the outline of Africa clearly visible facing us and there was Madagascar. So—a Fussball-Globus indeed.

Later that evening, after dinner in a Biergarten on the bank of the Piegnitz, we return to the Hauptmarkt and the Globus is alight—the continents clearly visible and various spots on the earth illuminated with purple points of light. Not quite so jarring, and incongruous at night and a testament to the intensity of Weltmeisterschaft Fieber, here in Deutschland!