Trautmann's Journey

My God! It's almost two months since my new year's blog resolution, which means I'm already behind on my own self-imposed discipline of at least one article a month. But to hell with it! Here goes...

Let me start by explaining something: my name is ASBO and I am a Canoholic. This is to say that I suffer from the insane delusion that there is a Canon of Great Works of Literature which I really must read Before I Die. It's a sort of set book-itis. If I arrive at the Pearly Gates unable to answer the essay questions on Proust/Rilke/Joyce etc. etc... St. Peter will find me out and condemn me to a Hell of Detention where, prodded by a thousand literary devils insisting on relevant quotations and close reference to the text, I shall fail and refail my examination for all eternity.

Empty ambitions of virtue, however, serve largely to nourish its opposite and it was the vicious miscreant in me, who, in an idle half-hour in the staff lending library, fell upon "Trautmann's Journey - From Hitler Youth to FA Cup Legend" by Catrine Clay. Footy and Swastikas! Irresistible really! Suck it up, Jack Ralphs! (my old English teacher). It tells the story of the great Bert Trautmann, who came to England as a German prisoner of war and ended up playing in goal for Manchester City. As it happens, I am old enough to just about remember Bert Trautmann because he played for Manchester City until 1964, around the time that I was becoming a sentient being as far as football was concerned.

[Footnote: I was 12 years old at the time. I had already been going to games with my father for a couple of years. Chelsea and Fulham mostly, as they were most easily accessible from our home in Ealing. I was precociously knowledgable of the principle teams, their nicknames and the names of their grounds from a card game I played with my best friend, Nick Berg (Hi Nick, if you're out there!) For some unknown reason Everton, "the Toffees", Goodison Park particularly sticks in the mind or even the teeth! As for watching games, I seem to remember Fulham and Craven Cottage best. My father was a big fan of Johnny Haynes and took great delight in pointing out to me how he would pass into spaces which only more talented players than his team-mates could anticipate. Who were they? Tosh Chamberlain possibly? Jimmy Hill who I might just have caught the tail end of? I do remember him taking over as Coventry's manager, because I once took a bus, by myself, to Brentford to watch them play. I couldn't have been more than 11! The freedom of a more innocent age! Back with Fulham, there was definitely a Tony Macedo who played in goal. I remember a game when he broke or dislocated his arm. It was the era before substitutes and he bravely continued playing on the wing while one of the outfield players stood in for him in goal. George Cohen must have been around at the time, but I can't say I remember him. Actually, I seem to remember more of the Chelsea players of that era. The aspirated half-back line of Hollins, Hinton, Harris. Peter Bonetti. Terry Venables even. I'm fairly certain that we went to see a Second Division match between Chelsea and Liverpool! Dad, who obviously had a thing about cultured inside forwards, suggested that I look and learn from the play of Liverpool's Jimmy Melia. Thinking back, football was pretty central to our lives. Certainly, my younger brother and I spent a good deal of our time playing it. In the interminable games we played up at Hangar Hill Park, Colin would play in goal wearing the green keeper's jersey my Granny had knitted him. Spectacular diving was his particular forte. He used to arrive home covered in mud, but always managed to grin his way out of trouble. As for Bert Trautmann, I can best remember him from spectacular diving photographs in my father's copy of "The Clown Prince of Soccer" a biography of the great Len Shackleton, who was probably Dad's favourite ever player.]

Getting back to"Trautmann's Journey", however, it is not so much a tale of football as a tale of redemption through football. Bert Trautmann became a football legend when he broke his neck in the 1956 FA Cup final and played on. But the story of how he got there was no less amazing. He grew up in Nazi Germany, where his "Aryan" looks and athletic prowess made him a hero of the Hitler Youth. At the outbreak of the war he joined the Luftwaffe and fought with the Luftwaffe regiment against partisans on the Eastern front before volunteering to train as a parachutist. He then went on to fight in France and was finally made a prisoner of war as the allies invaded the heart of Germany. His positive treatment at the hands of his British captors seems to have opened his eyes to the possibility of a renewal of human decency. Upon his release he opted to stay on in England and his football career took off. He testifies himself to his conscious desire to be a "good German". Even today, he is still recognised and admired in Manchester. "Brits nicer than Germans" is a theme which is always like play well in the U.K. But for me, where the book excels is in the insight it gives into what it was like for ordinary people living under the Nazi regime. Born in 1923, Bernd (his real name) grew up in a modest working class environment in Bremen. His father had fought in the First war and, reading between the lines, seems to have suffered from chronic post traumatic stress disorder as a result. Bernd was a promising pupil at school, but with the advent of the Nazis and their emphasis on athleticism, he was tacitly encouraged to focus on sports to the detriment of his lessons. Effectively compelled to join the Hitler Youth, Bernd revelled in the opportunity to enjoy the outdoor life and unlimited games. He was specially selected to go on an extended Hitler Youth summer camp in Silesia. Ms. Clay poignantly describes his mother's heartbreak at losing her favourite son to the Hitlerian ideology. How she silently witnessed his tragic susceptibility to the flattering propaganda of race superiority, unable to speak out for fear of reprisals. Children were known to denounce their parents for harbouring "anti-german" sentiments.
At the outbreak of war, Berndt's mother wept at his volunteering for the Luftwaffe, while his otherwise distant father sought to convey to him the true horrific nature of war. But Berndt was already a creature of the regime, sold on a fantasy of his own heroism. He started out as a motor mechanic before being transferred to the Luftwaffe regiment. He fought partisans in occupied Russia then, as Ms. Clay describes it, virtually on a whim, trained as an elite paratrooper. As he fights in Normandy and then finally in Germany itself, we get a clear impression of the process of brutalisation which he undergoes, as, without any prospect of victory, the sheer habit of combat becomes a deadly and deadening end in itself. Captured by the British, he is profoundly grateful for the decent treatment he is given and intrigued by the relaxed and joky attitude of the enemy troops. It's almost as though then and here he undergoes a sort of Damascene conversion to the British way of being.

The football part of the book is, in truth, less interesting. Bernd, now Bert, had always been a talented and commited athlete, while his war experience had taught him utter fearlessness. It was these qualities together which made him such an exceptional goalkeeper. Throughout he seems quite openly to have seen his footballing in England as his way of repaying a debt. Ms. Clay writes with a natural simplicity of tone, which serves to bring out the essentially unpretentious nature of her subject. What in a way is weird is the utter ordinariness of the extraordinary events described - as if things have their own automatic inevitability, that, once triggered, the Nazi madness had to be acted out as a sort of ineluctable karma. It's difficult not to accept that, at a certain level, things do just happen and individuals have only a very limited influence on the way in which events unfurl. What "Trautmann's Journey" shows us is that there is inside us a grain of humility, an unaffected humanity, a sense of common decency which is infinitely more real than all our megalomaniac fantasies and that it is our duty, above all, to nurture these seemingly modest qualities if we are to hope to be able to live in anything like a civilised society.