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An immigrant group meets in a suburban garden for a barbecue. "What do these men and women have in common?" Says the voiceover. "Their kids play for the German national team."
The 2008 advertisement of the German Football Association (DFB) came at a time when German sport was boasting in its ethnic diversity. The predominance of minorities in the higher echelons of football was a source of great pride for a country that had worked hard to integrate one of the largest immigrant populations in Europe.
No one could better symbolize the success of these efforts than Mesut Ozil, a 29-year-old Arsenal midfielder and son of a Turkish immigrant who was part of the winning team. the World Cup for Germany in Brazil in 2014.
A photo of eight years ago shows Chancellor Angela Merkel shaking hands in the locker room after the 3-0 win of the World Cup. national team on Turkey. Since then, it has been, according to the terms of the magazine Der Spiegel, the "mascot of integration" of Germany
. Ozil leaves the national team this week, citing "racism and disrespect" on his Turkish roots. The German media have made him a scapegoat for the disastrous performance of the team at the 2018 World Cup, he said. Ozil's controversial and undoubtedly undecided decision to be photographed with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in May was unjustly described as a "direct explanation of the defeat in Russia". he said. "I'm German when we win, but I'm an immigrant when we lose."
The effect of Ozil's statement was explosive. Germany has suddenly been confronted with the sad truth that integration is not the flawless success that has been presented to it.
"Many young migrants probably ask themselves: how will they do it if Ozil can not?" Writes Jaafar Abdul Karim, a German journalist of Lebanese origin, in Die Zeit.
Ozil's nine-year international career extends over a period in which Germany has profoundly changed – and then changed again. Under Merkel, he projected an image of a cosmopolitan rainbow nation comfortable with herself and her immigrant population. Nothing better than the rule change of 2014 allowing the Germans to have dual nationality.
But since then things have changed dramatically. The arrival of 1 million refugees in Germany in 2015-16 provoked a reaction against immigration and the spectacular rise of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD ). Germany seems to have fallen in love with its open country image where migrants are welcome.
This atmosphere was summed up in a commentary by Alexander Gauland, the leader of the AfD, on the Afro-German footballer Jerome Boateng in 2016. People Gauland says so, but that does not mean that They want to live next door.
But these are peanuts compared to the wave of racist abuse that Ozil and Ilkay Gundogan, another player from the national team who was photographed with Erdogan, had to face. After Germany dropped out of the World Cup in the group stage, Jens Maier, the AFD MP, tweeted: "Without Ozil, we would have won," above a footballer's photo: " Are you happy, my president? " Jürgen Elsässer, right-wing activist, said that "the two Turks" of the national team "should return to Anatolia"
A recent column of former German captain Lothar Matthäus was perhaps even more alarming. "I often feel with Ozil that he does not feel well in a DFB band," he writes.
There is something strangely reminiscent of this in the 1990 British Cricket Test controversy. Conservative Minister Norman Tebbit said the loyalty of British Asians can be measured by those they support at international cricket matches. A similar point was made by the critics of Ozil.
This is an insidious message for German Turks. According to Esra Kucuk, head of the Allianz Cultural Foundation, "there is this feeling that if you feel some kind of cultural affiliation [to Turkey] you can not be a loyal German citizen". That, she says, was not the case in the past.
That's why the Ozil affair has been so depressing for people like Kucuk. "We lost a lot more than the World Cup," she says.
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