Football divides and unites
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A united Germany took on England on Sunday in one of the biggest grudge matches of the World Cup. But political stakes in this hotly anticipated game were nothing to those seen back when there were two German teams and Cold War animosity was never more evident than on the football pitch.
From the 1950s to the fall of the Berlin Wall, sport served as a way for the capitalist West and communist East to play out their bitter rivalry without resorting to digging out the nuclear weapons.
This deeply political side of Germany's sporting life is the subject of "We Versus Us", a new exhibition at Bonn's Haus der Geschichte - the Museum of German History.
It being World Cup year, of course, the West and East German football teams get particular attention.
West Germany showed strong form, emerging from the ashes of World War II to sweep to World Cup victory in 1956 and repeated the feat in 1974.
But in a pointed irony, the only team to beat that 1974 side on their way to glory were the East Germans, who then - to hammer their point home - also took the gold medal at the Olympics two years later.
So will all this German historical baggage work to England's advantage?
Professor Stephan Wassong of the German Sport University in Cologne doesn't believe it will have much effect on the current German side - which strangely enough has just one player from the former East Germany. He points out most of the players are so young they cannot even remember living in a divided Germany.
"There are still tensions between East and West in society as a whole. But in the German national team there's no discussion at all about whether a player was born in the East or the West. And this is a clear sign of a completely united team," he insists.
German captain Franz Beckenbauer, who played on the victorious 1974 West German side, showed no qualms ahead of the match, throwing down the gauntlet by slamming the English team as "burnt out" and their performance in their first two matches as "paltry" (although he did later apologise for these comments).
Whatever the case, as spectators biting their nails in both countries will testify, a clash on this scale always makes things that bit more exciting.
