Germany defeated Argentina 1:0 on Sunday when Mario Goetze scored the game-winning goal at the 113th minute. This was the first time a European team has won the Word Cup in a tournament played in the Americas. German fans are thrilled. The Brits on the other hand–their team defeated early in the 2014 World Cup competition–have a slightly different take on this year’s tournament. Simon Winder, author of “Germania: a Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern, compares England and Germany to rivaling siblings in an article published in the British newspaper, “The Telegraph”.

Mario Goetze (right) scored game-winning goal in the 2014 World Cup tournament

Dysfunctional twins?

Wilder portrays Britain’s 2:1 defeat by Uruguay as a devastating blow to the British Psyche. He points out that Uruguay is a country with a population barely twice that of England’s County of Essex. Germany, Britain’s neighbor across the North Sea on the other hand, won the World Cup. Wilder goes on to draw a parallel between the World Cup competition and the economic competition between the two countries. He writes, “I have always felt that Britain and Germany are like dysfunctional twins, with a mass of shared values but quite different life experiences. It has always been Britain that has (in its own estimation) been the ‘good twin’ whereas Germany is the ‘bad twin’, or even the ‘evil twin’. The World Cup gives us a chilling new possibility: could Germany now be ‘the twin that has done well for himself’, while Britain has become ‘the twin that took the poor life decisions’?” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10957770/Lets-learn-to-love-Germany.html. Wilder concludes by writing, “Let’s learn to love Germany. We [England] are constantly buffeted by our political leaders into a view that Britain has no choice in the face of the icy wind of globalization that we need to accept deteriorating conditions for workers, 24-hour-a-day shopping, an intrusive security state, centralized government and massive inequalities of wealth, as though these are things that we can no more object to than to the weather. And yet here is Germany, just across the North Sea, with an economy getting on for 50 per cent larger than our own, which by almost any measure effortlessly contradicts these assertions.” I think Germans would be proud to hear of Wilder’s musings. Having been weighted down for so long by its recent dark past, Germany has worked hard to prove to the world that it can and wants to be a peaceful nation and a good neighbor. It has also successfully managed its own economic havoc following reunification and now produced a remarkable soccer team.