{"id":97372,"date":"2026-06-30T11:05:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T09:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schaltzeit.com\/?p=97372"},"modified":"2026-07-24T15:28:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T13:28:52","slug":"frueher-war-mehr-lametta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schaltzeit.com\/en\/frueher-war-mehr-lametta\/","title":{"rendered":"The good old days"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The vision of the future that the \u201esummer fairy tale\u201d once represented has expired. Still, we shouldn\u2019t completely discard it. What does a futurist make of the nostalgia surrounding the 2006 World Cup?<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNo other tournament do I remember as vividly as the 2006 World Cup. The anticipation of a carefree football summer, the flags we painted on each other's cheeks. And my Panini album. I was so determined to collect every single player that I traded and bought missing stickers in online forums, at twelve. To this day, nine players are still missing, and the emotional value of that album is probably greater than that of the master's thesis I just submitted.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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That was 20 years ago. The Sommerm\u00e4rchen - Germany's \"summer fairy tale\" - and a country that reinvented itself for four weeks. Right in the middle of it: a twelve-year-old girl with her own version of that future.<\/p>

Now the 2026 World Cup is under way. The biggest of all time: the most teams, the most host countries, the most air miles flown by a FIFA president. And it is precisely this tournament of superlatives that the German team is contesting (or rather: was contesting) in a retro-design kit that visually recalls, among other things, the shirts of the 1990 World Cup-winning side.<\/p>

Why does an event that knows nothing but records reach for the past, of all things? And what are we carrying around with us when we rave about the Sommerm\u00e4rchen - a memory, or an image of the future long past its expiry date?<\/p>

Image of the future vs. nostalgia image - two sides of the same present<\/h3>

Futures studies frequently works with images of the future: ideas, assumptions and perceptions of futures that may be desirable, possible, probable, or explicitly undesirable. The crucial point: even though they refer to the future, they are always anchored in the present. They reveal which values, needs and assumptions shape us today.<\/p>

Nostalgia images work in a strikingly similar way, only with the direction of time reversed. Lilith Boettcher (2021) describes them in her master's thesis as bittersweet images that we create today of the past. They are not factual memories but imaginative, subjective, contextual and thus not only an expression of our longings, but also a mirror of the present.<\/p>

Both types of image arise from the same irritations. When the present unsettles us, we imagine, sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards.<\/p>

With the Sommerm\u00e4rchen, a third category comes into play that makes it special: it contains a past future<\/strong>. 2006 was not just a summer; it was a horizon of expectation. For a moment, a different national self-image seemed possible: open to the world, light, at ease. When we remember the Sommerm\u00e4rchen today, we are not just remembering a tournament. We are remembering a feeling about the future. That explains the peculiar force of this nostalgia: it mourns not only what has passed, but also a future that never came to be.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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The Sommerm\u00e4rchen, deconstructed<\/h3>

Time for a closer look at the image we are carrying around by using a tool from critical futures studies. Causal Layered Analysis<\/a> (CLA), developed by Sohail Inayatullah (1998), distinguishes four layers on which an image like the Sommerm\u00e4rchen operates:<\/p>

On the surface, the litany (1)<\/strong>: \u201cSchwarz-Rot-Geil\u201d headlines in the BILD tabloid (a pun turning the national colours black-red-gold into \u201cblack-red-brilliant\u201d), record viewing figures, millions on Berlin's fan mile, nearly four weeks of sunshine. An unusually euphoric litany for this method. Beneath it, the systemic level (2)<\/strong>: a nation-branding campaign following on from \u201cDu bist Deutschland\u201d (\u201cYou are Germany\u201d), a World Cup bid with its very own corruption affair that never made it into the collective scrapbook, a meticulously organised staging of spontaneity.<\/p>

At the worldview level (3)<\/strong> , something becomes clear: the narrative of \"unselfconscious patriotism\" was not a retrospective description of that summer - it ran alongside it in real time. Headlines and special broadcasts told people what was happening (\"Germany is finally celebrating, free of all inhibition!\"), and precisely through that, it happened. Anyone painting the flag on their cheek was already following this narrative. Inayatullah (1998) calls this: discourses constitute their subject. Our gut feeling, our sense of life, and the way we are talking about things shape our understanding of them. And at the core of this, the myth (4)<\/strong>: the summer fairy tale itself. Taken literally, it is a story with a guaranteed happy ending, one in which a country plays itself free of its own history.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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