Will Berlin, and its soccer team, succeed?

Hertha BSC's lousy performance in spite of high hopes mirrors the city of Berlin since the fall of the wall.

Cameron AbadiOctober 17, 2009 09:21Updated May 30, 2010 12:11

Hertha Berlin's goal keeper, Sascha Burchert (center), reacts as Hamburg SV scores the third goal during their Bundesliga soccer match in Berlin, Oct. 4, 2009. (Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters)

BERLIN, Germany — It would be wrong to say that Berlin’s main soccer team, Hertha BSC, has been a total failure this season — it still has a foothold in Germany’s top league, if just barely after a disastrous start.

But, the team has been displaying a head-scratching lack of will, refusing to fight for opportunities and not seizing the ones that it’s been handed. There’s no doubt that the team’s myriad problems are magnified considerably by the optimism with which its fans begin every soccer season, and the wary respect with which the rest of the country had been eyeing the team before this season in particular. With a fourth place finish last year, Hertha was not long ago encouraging the very same high hopes that it now seems so intent on dashing.

And in that way, Hertha has much in common with its host city, Berlin. Ever since the Wall crumbled and Berlin was reunified 20 years ago, and especially since the German parliament agreed to return the seat of government from the sleepy West German town of Bonn to the country’s pre-World War II capital, Germany had developed enticing visions of what Berlin could and should become.

Talk was rampant of Germany again having a “world city,” a metropolis that could consolidate the diverse strengths of the country’s regional hubs. Capitalizing on its history and geography as a bridge to eastern Europe, Berlin would soon return to its pre-war heyday and soon enough compete with Paris, London and New York for cultural, economic and political influence.

Today’s reality is far from that vision. In this 20th anniversary year, Berlin finds itself a city in bankruptcy, with persistent unemployment far higher than the national average and hundreds of thousands living on government assistance. Neither side of the formerly divided city took kindly to capitalism’s shock treatment: Both West and East Berlin had been recipients of massive subsidies from their respective countries that were abruptly cut off after Germany set other post-unification priorities, under the assumption that Berlin would be able to take care of itself.

Instead, the native industries either went bankrupt or moved away after the subsidies did, while the other jobs stayed put wherever they were — finance jobs in Frankfurt, media in Hamburg, high tech in Munich. Berlin was left with evidence of its own hubris in reams of empty housing that had been built for the waves of anticipated newcomers who never showed up. In recent months, the city has even shown a disheartening talent for fumbling one of its own strongest assets, namely, transportation infrastructure. First, the city government had the historic inner-city Tempelhof airport shut down before having a credible idea about what to do with the evacuated facilities.

For many, the last straw was when the intra-city public transportation S-Bahn rail ground to a halt after it was discovered the trains had faulty brakes. With thousands of residents of the city unable to commute to work or fulfill their daily routines, Berliners began to wonder whether the chaos they were experiencing was somehow more than incidental — whether the city, fundamentally, didn’t yet have its act together.

That clarifying catastrophe on the S-Bahn rails had a simultaneous analogue on the Hertha soccer field, an incident when Hertha’s momentously inferior play finally compelled Germans to ask whether the soccer team’s weaknesses weren’t merely a small part of a larger failure.