A look back reveals that the Germans in particular tended to start wars without much thought. Not even the Second World War was a lesson for the especially dame. Not much would have been missing, and in the summer of 1958 the rabble would have started another war of wars. Even then it became apparent how fragile civilized Europe is and how quickly national upheavals can cause tempers to explode.
On June 24, 1958, teams from Sweden and Germany met. It was about winning the semi-finals of the World Cup. They met in the “Hell of Gothenburg” like that picture newspaper titled, because something diabolical happened there, at least from a German point of view. In Swedish stadiums, it was already common back then for fans to sing wildly and chant. “Hey Sweden!” shouted from the ranks, “let’s go Sweden! …!”
Hearing such noise for the first time, some Germans thought they were back at the front. The football magazine table football even saw himself “transferred to a kind of Berlin sports palace, where the cheerleader’s name was Goebbels”. Resentment was already rampant, especially after the Germans lost the game 3-1. Complaining about hate speech, DFB President Peco Bauwens threatened that this country would never be set foot again.
A hatred of Sweden broke out like in the Thirty Years’ War, in which the Swedes had raged brutally in Bavaria, among other places. Even the press went wild. The Hamburg evening paper saw the horrors of World War surpassed. And the Saar newspaper wrote, “40,000 representatives of this mediocre people poured out hatred on us”.
From then on, gas station attendants refused to refuel Swedish cars. During tournaments, the Swedish flags were torn down. And the innkeepers removed the popular Swedish platter from the menu. At least a few Bavarian newspapers stayed reasonable. “For us, the sentence applies: The war is over!” Said a Swedish journalist to Günther Wolfbauer, the reporter at the time Munich Mercury. “And you should leave it at that,” he replied, “the Thirty Years’ War was more than 300 years ago.”
“You have to be a good loser,” wrote the SZ editorialist Ernst Müller-Meiningen jr., who branded the bullying as a deeply regrettable act of old Nazi spirit. But it would still be a while before “Ikea, Abba and Volvo shaped a cheerful image of Sweden in this country”, as the author Christian Eichler concisely described the progress of this international relationship.