Franz Beckenbauer dead: Wolfgang Thierse on the football legend

Football, personified by Franz Beckenbauer, was part of the political culture of the West. People in the East looked at it with a lot of envy. In 1990 he made his own contribution to reunification. A guest post.

GI don't know exactly when Franz Beckenbauer came into my football memory. It was probably, at the latest, in 1966, at the World Cup in England. I was a student at the time and we had agreed to watch the television broadcast of the London final together – in the Catholic student priest's apartment on Thorner Strasse in East Berlin.

We sat tightly packed in a small room in front of a small television and watched the game with a lot of noise and were, like all Germans in West and East, excited and outraged about the infamous “Wembley goal”, which wasn't one – after all, it had a Soviet (!) linesman appeared. But despite all the excitement, I didn't overlook or forget the duel between Beckenbauer and Bobby Charlton, the legendary English playmaker at the time. Since then, Beckenbauer has been an integral part of my footballing “world view”.