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BERLIN — Across most countries in this year’s World Cup, the national flag is a natural way to support the home team.
In Germany, it’s… complicated.
There is plenty of excitement about the German team surging through Group E: One Berlin bakery chain is advertising slices of black, red and gold cake; shops are hawking tricolor plastic leis, noisemakers and face paint; fans gathering to watch the games don German team jerseys.
But as Germany takes the field against Ecuador today, what is less visible around the country is the black, red and gold of the German flag. That’s because, for the last eight decades, Germany has had a deeply complex relationship with its own national symbols and the concept of national pride.
After the Nazi defeat in World War II, expressions of national pride were taboo in Germany. Instead, the country’s postwar leaders promoted Verfassungspatriotismus, or constitutional patriotism: a sense of pride in postwar Germany’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law. By contrast, overt national pride was largely the remit of the far- and extreme right — so much so that a slogan from the neo-Nazi NPD party in the early 2000s, deeply controversial at the time, was Ich bin stolz, ein Deutscher zu sein (“I’m proud to be German”).
Then came the Sommermärchen (“summer fairy tale”) of 2006, when Germany hosted its first World Cup since unification and found itself uncommonly awash in black, red and gold. A German friend once quipped that, before that year, if you saw a house flying a German flag you knew the person living there was a neo-Nazi; afterwards; they could be a neo-Nazi or a soccer fan.
“2006 was a coming-out moment for Germany,” said Sudha David-Wilp, a Berlin-based vice president and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “It allowed Germans to feel comfortable in their national skin and to unfurl their flag.”
That growing embrace of sports-related patriotism has been complicated in recent years by the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which has co-opted the flag and favors jettisoning the country’s postwar memory culture to make way for vocal national pride. Its leaders have accused other political parties of being insufficiently patriotic, including during a recent dustup over whether AfD parliamentarians were allowed to let the German flag wave from the windows of their Bundestag offices during a far-right protest.
“The German flag plays a central role in the aesthetics of [the AfD’s] political communication,” said Johannes Hillje, a Berlin-based political consultant who tracks far- and extreme-right rhetoric in Germany. “Part of the AfD’s communication strategy is to reinterpret national symbols and general terms such as ‘homeland,’ ‘nation,’ and ‘patriotism’ in line with its far-right ideology.”
With the AfD leading in national polls, politicians from left-leaning parties have expressed unease with the overt symbolism of waving the German flag. The Left Party advertised a World Cup watch party with the tagline, “No flags, no nationalism, no stress!”
And Philipp Türmer, leader of the youth wing of the center-left Social Democrats, told Spiegel he would gladly wear a German jersey but couldn’t imagine himself waving the flag: “I’ve spent too much time in my life at counter-protests where the [fascists] on the other side of the police barricade decked themselves out in black, red and gold,” he said.
Both the shift toward expressing more national pride and the AfD’s strong association with it were apparent in polling among the German electorate. Sixty percent of German respondents surveyed for this month’s POLITICO Poll said they were very or somewhat proud to be German, compared with 32 percent who said they were not that proud or not at all proud. At the same time, just 30 percent said they owned a German flag and 24 percent said they had clothing with the German flag on it.
And asked to name the political party they most identify with someone saying they are proud of Germany, 35 percent named the AfD, more than twice the figure for any other party.
German captain Joshua Kimmich told Bild ahead of his team’s first match against Curaçao that he hoped the World Cup would be an opportunity to encourage a new kind of “positive patriotism” in Germany — one distinct from the version pushed by the far right.
“Our team can be a model for that,” he said. “If you look at our team, we already have many players with different backgrounds, different religions and from different parts of society. We want to be successful together.”
It’s shaping up to be another soccer-filled day for the New York City area’s soccer-mad top politicos. While New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill is expected to attend the Germany-Ecuador match at MetLife Stadium, according to our New Jersey Playbook, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will create action of his own. Our New York Playbook reports that Mamdani is scheduled to deliver his daily World Cup traffic and weather update, appear on a British sports program, host a pickup soccer match and address the Police Athletic League — although no word yet on which of its sports will dominate his attention.
Kurdistan is not a member of FIFA, resigned instead to the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, whose biennial CONIFA World Football Cup pits non-sovereign states, minorities, stateless peoples and regions against one another.
But the world’s approximately 40 million Kurds — often called one of the largest ethnic groups without their own nation-state — may have already been today’s big winners.
The Italy-based site Asia News has reported there are nine players of Kurdish extraction at the World Cup, spread across four teams, including Iran, Iraq and Switzerland. But it is German forward Deniz Undav who has attracted the most attention, for both his on-field prowess and eagerness to assert his Kurdish identity at every turn.
The son of a Kurdish-Yazidi family that migrated to Germany to Turkey after the country’s 1980 coup d’état, Undav is tied with Lionel Messi for the most goal contributions in the tournament and will have the chance to add to three-goal, two-assist tally today against Ecuador. Undav has celebrated his goals, including a stoppage-time winner against Côte d’Ivoire, with a traditional Kurdish govend dance. (Our corporate cousins at Bild detailed the origins of Undav’s celebration with his club team, VfB Stuttgart.)
Even if Undav doesn’t come off the bench again for Germany, many Kurds already have something to celebrate: the surprise early elimination of Turkey, whose government they consider an enemy both inside its own borders and beyond. Kurdish social-media feeds have become cheering sections for whichever team is facing off against Turkey, which will face the United States today in a match that has become meaningless for both sides.
“What a great way to start the day—waking up and finding out that Turkey lost the match,” an account named @Kurdistan_C wrote on X early Saturday. “Congratulations to the people of Paraguay on their team’s win against Turkey.”
It is unclear when Kurdistan’s actual team will take the pitch next. The Kurdistan Football Association was suspended by CONIFA after it failed to follow through on plans to host the World Football Cup in 2024. One has not been scheduled since.
“At the moment, Kurdistan FA are excluded from all international football inside CONIFA and have no opportunity to promote and celebrate the beauty and greatness of its people,” the organization announced in September 2024.
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