Wandering with Sam
Stuttgart Germany...The 2006 World Cup
Jun 30, 2006, 15:44

I am spending the summer of 2006 living in Stuttgart while working for the United States European Command. It just so happened that Germany was hosting the World Cup while I was there, so, I spent a lot of my spare time exploring Stuttgart’s various attractions and neighborhoods by bicycle while taking in the international excitement of the World Cup.

Schlossplatz

Stuttgart is a fairly large city in southern Germany, the capital of Baden-Württemberg. This region, also referred to as Swabia, is located in southwestern Germany, bordering Switzerland to the south and France to the east. This region is a heavily forested series of low mountains and river valleys, very similar in topography to the Coastal Mountains of western Oregon.

The western half of Baden Württemberg is largely the Schwarzwald or the Black Forest, while the eastern part consists of rolling fields interspersed with forests leading up to the Alps to the south in Switzerland. Baden and Württemberg were two separate entities, until Napoleon merged them together in the nineteenth century, but regional differences still exist.

Stuttgart is the largest city in the region with a metropolitan population of about two million people, about the size of Portland.

Probably Stuttgart is most well known for being the world headquarters of the merged German and American automotive company, Daimler Chrysler. Production facilities for this conglomerate are scattered around the suburbs of Stuttgart (and in other places like Detroit) while the famous three pronged star overlooks the city at the top of the Hauptbahnhof. Aside from Daimler Chrysler, Stuttgart is also a modern high-tech city with office parks for companies like Siemens, Microsoft and the like, and it is the headquarters city for the American military European Command, also known as EUCOM.

Despite recently announced cutbacks, southern Germany is still a major hub of American military activities with major elements in Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Kaiserslautern and Würzburg.

Stau on the A8

The city and its suburbs extend across several low mountain ranges in the region, with the main central part of the city surrounded by steep hills and upscale residences, telecom towers, thinned out forests, and vineyards. Since urbanized areas tend to end abruptly at the edge of a thick forest interspersed with numerous bicycle paths and small parks, it is possible to almost totally circumnavigate the Stuttgart region on a bicycle without riding on the side of a busy street. That is not to say that Stuttgart does not have any busy streets or traffic problems, since the messy convergence of the A8 and the A81 south of the city is often a massive tangle of tractor-trailers and cars battling with each other to move into the appropriate lane. However, this vast network of bicycle paths and secondary roads in conjunction with the extensive network of commuter trains allows someone to easily sidestep all of the congestion, if they so desire.

Julia Domna, 3rd century Roman BW Museum

Stuttgart is probably not the tourist magnet like other German cities like Munich, Nuremburg or Heidelberg tend to be, but nonetheless it is a very nice city that is not marred at all by its major industrial role.

The city features several museums, including the Baden Württemberg Land Museum, which includes prehistoric, Greek, and Roman archeological relics along with a large display of late medieval wooden carvings from the nearby cathedral city of Ulm. Another prominent museum is the Staatsgalerie which features modern paintings (i.e. brightly colored geometric shapes, a jet black canvas, or abstract sculptures that resemble construction sites) along with Italian Renaissance pieces and nineteenth century paintings by artists like Claude Monet or Pablo Picasso. And another one of my favorite museums is the Lapidarium, which includes a collection of Roman tombs and monumental engravings that used to line Roman highway approaches to cities when Stuttgart was still a part of the Roman Empire.

The most popular attraction in Stuttgart is by far the main shopping region along the Königstraße (King’s Street). This mile long pedestrian mall is the heart of the city, teaming with crowds of people seven days a week (even without the World Cup in session). Much of it resembles a shopping mall, with typical European department stores along with smaller trendy clothing outlets, numerous outdoor cafes and street performers interspersed with Baroque palaces and a late medieval cathedral. As the evening progresses, the attention shifts from stores and plazas to the bars and nightclubs that are scattered around the city center, many of which stay open all night. The volume of people in the city center is always overwhelming, even on a Sunday when all the shops are closed. This is a definite indicator that most people go to the city center when they want to do serious shopping as opposed to suburban malls like in the United States.

A typical Saturday on the Königstraße

If you want to get away from the consumer scene (which admittedly can be a bit much), the city has a long narrow park that extends from the Schlossplatz (Palace Plaza) in the center of the city all the way to Bad Canstatt on the Neckar River. This park used to be a palace garden three centuries ago, but today it is a vast playground for cyclists, joggers, rollerbladers, sunbathers, soccer players and even beer drinkers at the beer garden. There are no regulations about drinking beer in public in Germany.

Although the town center is usually filled with people on any given day, it was downright packed with throngs of soccer fans when Germany hosted the World Cup. During the summer of 2006, Stuttgart, along with several other German cities, hosted the FIFA World Cup. This is a four year culmination of international soccer competition. Although soccer is easily eclipsed in the United States by football, basketball and baseball, it is the most prominent competitive sport in much of the rest of the world, especially in Europe, Africa and Latin America. Therefore, when the World Cup was in session, the entire city took lengthy breaks as people gathered in front of big screen televisions scattered around the city in pubs, restaurants and other such places.

Croatian fans

The Schlossplatz in the center of the city was converted into a huge public viewing area with three large video screens set up to play live telecasts of almost all of the games. A few of the games were actually played at Daimler Chrysler Stadium in Stuttgart, but since the tickets sold out fast and tended to be expensive, the next best bet was to head down to the Schlossplatz to watch the live telecasts of the games. Although I was not a huge soccer fan (I still remember when a soccer ball was kicked right into my face back in 1979), I was easily converted by the allure of the huge crowds of fans dressed in their national colors in support of their respective teams. During the games, the Schlossplatz would be filled with crowds of Croatians in their red and white checkered jerseys waving their red, white and blue flags, facing off with a crowd of Australians, the socceroos, in their green and yellow jerseys waving their blue flag with the British Union Jack and the Southern Cross. Or during the USA-Italian Game, Americans were running around with red, white and blue faces and striped Uncle Sam hats, with an American flag draped around their shoulder like Captain America, facing off with cute Italian girls draped in silky red, white and green flags (admittedly, there was a lot more red, white and green that day).

When the Netherlands played in Stuttgart, the entire city was filled with thousands of Dutchmen dressed in bright orange (including a mock bright orange lederhosen outfit with a green pointy cap and a tale). Every time a goal was scored; the entire Schlossplatz would erupt with flags, screams, cheers and blaring horns.

German Victory over Ecuador

And when a team won (an experience that the American fans did not share), the crowds would linger in the Schlossplatz while dancing with their flags up by the stage, run crazy along the Königstraße, blare their car horns for the next couple of hours, or head for the bars for a night of partying.

The most impressive was the German games when the entire city of Stuttgart went wild waving their flags, blaring their car horns, and dancing to tacky beer drinking music and Queen’s “We Are the Champions” while chanting victory slogans like “Berlin, Berlin, wir fahren nach Berlin!” (“Berlin, Berlin, we’re going to Berlin” - where the final championship game is to be held).

Berlin, Berlin, Wir Fahren nach Berlin!

At times it was a little too crazy, like when the excited German fans started to run into the street to tip cars over or when the Croatians filled the Schlossplatz with broken glass after carelessly tossing away their empty beer bottles.

However, the worst were the English, who apparently caused a full scale riot in Stuttgart by singing drunken songs that were a bit insulting to nearby German fans. I suspect that a few of them were reliving the Battle of Britain! I remember hearing reports of British police keeping a vigil at major British airports to try to prevent the hooligans from going to Germany to disrupt the World Cup Games, but apparently they were only partially successful.

Fortunately, the problem with the English, actually only involved a few hundred of the tens of thousands of otherwise peaceful fans who came to Stuttgart from there.

In another couple of weeks, the World Cup will be over and all the brightly dressed fans will have returned to their homelands, and Stuttgart will once again be the somewhat docile but pleasant city surrounded by factories, forests and vineyards.