The hounding of a German football star

“I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.” That was the lament last week of the German football star Mesut Özil, as he tried to make sense of the racist campaign being waged against him, said Christian Spiller in Die Zeit (Hamburg). It all started in May, when the Arsenal player, a German born of Turkish parents, posed smiling for a photograph with Turkey’s President Erdogan, whom many Germans regard as a brutal despot. It got worse when the German team crashed out of the World Cup in the group stage and Özil was singled out for blame. “Turkish pig”; “goatf***er”; “go back to Anatolia”: those were some of the comments made on social media. Now Özil has resigned from the national team in disgust, and who can blame him? “What’s wrong with Germany” that it behaves like this towards one of the most gifted footballers it’s ever had?

This will have a terrible impact on young Germans of Turkish origin who see him as a role model, said Gökalp Babayigit in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich). Özil never sought that accolade – it was thrust on him by the footballing authorities. The more praise and awards he won, the more the cry went up: “look how our sport helps with integration”. But the authorities are now silent and he’s being dropped by sponsors, so the message now seems to be: no matter how well you do, you’ll always be seen in terms of your origins. Posing with Erdogan has reinforced the impression of Özil’s otherness, said Malte Lehming in Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin), but his motive for doing so was understandable. As he explained, he wasn’t identifying with a politician but was, in line with his family’s values, paying respect to the head of state of his country of origin. He has “two hearts”, he says, one German, one Turkish. And what’s wrong with that? Americans of German descent in Wisconsin aren’t pilloried for attending Tyrolean folk dancing clubs. You’d think conservatives would approve of maintaining traditional links: instead they are heaping abuse.

Even so, Özil was incredibly naive, said Asli Aydintasbas in The Washington Post. Like many “diaspora kids” in Germany who cling to their roots, he’s myopic about facing up to the divisive nature of Erdogan – a man whose purges have caused great suffering in Turkey, who has jailed German citizens, who refers to German leaders as “Nazis”. Özil may have been mistreated, but his plight hardly compares to that of another German-born footballer, Deniz Naki, who in 2016 was provisionally barred from playing in Turkey; and in 2017 was given a suspended jail sentence by the Turkish authorities for criticising the brutal behaviour of Turkish soldiers in Kurdish areas. Eventually he fled to Germany, where he narrowly avoided assassination by suspected Turkish ultranationalists. Özil could do worse than respond to his overtures. “A photo of the two, walking arm in arm, would send the strongest message against Islamophobia and racism in sports.”