‘Franz in luck’: how Beckenbauer’s fairytale career inspired Germany

What made Franz Beckenbauer so appealing to generations of Germans is that – at least until the last few years of his life – he came across as a character straight out of a fairytale. Not from one of the Brothers Grimm originals, which are usually more twisted and sinister than the Disney versions, but from one of those stories in which everything always turns out well in the end: Franz im Glück, “Franz in luck”, was a headline that tracked Beckenbauer’s career since he burst on to the national scene as an 18-year-old.

“In a thoroughly un‑German way, he was born under a lucky star, someone who had the kind of successes fall into his lap for which others had to work their socks off,” the daily paper Taz wrote in its obituary of Beckenbauer, who died on Monday aged 78.

As a player, he was crowned European champion in 1972 and world champion in 1974, and repeated the latter feat as manager in Italy 16 years later. At club level, he won countless national and international trophies, mostly with Bayern Munich, the club whose rise to German dominance he later shaped as manager and president. As a functionary, he was instrumental in bringing the 2006 World Cup to Germany, a tournament now commonly referred to as the Sommermärchen or “summer fairytale”. Der Spiegel wrote: “Whatever he touched turned to gold. More than King Midas, he was Kaiser Midas.”

When Beckenbauer was once challenged on German TV to kick a football resting atop a beer glass through a ball-shaped hole in the wall, he naturally managed at the first attempt, with utter nonchalance. The quote most frequently shared after the news of his passing broke was one by the former Scotland manager Andy Roxburgh: “Franz is the only person in the world who would fly up if he jumped out the window.”

Rising to world stardom on the back of a post-war economic boom, Beckenbauer personified a resurgent Germany that could once again inspire something like pride in his compatriots. His career, wrote Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, was “a projection screen … for an epoch of which one can say it was probably the country’s best and most successful, at least in Western Germany”.

Die Zeit wrote: “Not Adenauer, not Kohl or [the schlager singer] Heino was the most important, greatest and best known German of the post-war era.”

The elegance of his playing style – the slaloming dashes into midfield, the mesmerising crosses with the outside of his boot – were not incidental but key to that story, for they made him personify a different kind of Germany. “We needed someone who could play football like Pelé, or at least play in a way that doesn’t make the rest of the world think of panzers,” Die Welt wrote.

The position on the football pitch whose modern interpretation Beckenbauer defined like no other player – libero, the “free man” in front of the defensive line – summed up this appeal: here was a man who was no longer dragged down by history, or deep thought, or guilt, but broke free.

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“For a long time, as long as no one had done before him, Beckenbauer stood for a better Germany,” Die Welt said. “He embodied something that the Germans and Germany want to be, but mostly aren’t: full of joie de vivre, casual and cosmopolitan – and not just hard‑working and successful.”

That Beckenbauer, supposedly a lifelong Catholic, was also a libero in terms of his libido seemed to do no harm to his appeal as a sweeper of the nation. Tales of adultery and children conceived out of wedlock were brushed off with his trademark nonchalance. “It’s not such a crime after all,” he reportedly said after it emerged that he had conceived a child with a Bayern Munich secretary at one of the club’s Christmas parties. “Our dear God is pleased with every child.”

The Grimm Brothers’ fairytale “Hans in Luck” is only about luck in an ironic sense: its titular hero is also a gullible fool who is done over by the people with whom he does business. Reports of suspected corruption linked to Beckenbauer’s role in procuring the 2006 World Cup, which led to him being banned by Fifa’s Ethics Committee in 2014, have suggested his fairytale too was never quite as straightforward as people wished it to be.