10 Films to Watch if You Like: The Miracle of Bern

As the World Cup whistles past in Qatar, Cinema Paradiso harks back to one of the all-time finals, as it ponders what to watch next if you liked The Miracle of Bern.

Every four years, the focus of global attention falls on football's World Cup. Unlike that other quadrennial celebration of sporting excellence, the Olympic Games, few films have been produced about the great moments that have made the FIFA tournament so iconic. Among the non-documentary titles in the Cinema Paradiso catalogue with a World Cup theme are Jasmin Dizdar's Beautiful People (1999); Steve Barron's Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001); Jafar Panahi's Offside (2006); Paris Leonti's Daylight Robbery (2008); Andrew Morahan's Goal III: Taking on the World (2009); Debs Paterson's Africa United (2010); James Erskine's Shooting For Socrates (2014); Jeffrey Zimbalist's Pelé: Birth of a Legend (2016); John McKay's Tina and Bobby (2017); and Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God (2021).

By far the best, however, is Sönke Wortmann's The Miracle of Bern (2003). This not only chronicles the progress of West Germany and Hungary to the 1954 final in the Swiss capital, but it also captures the mood in a divided Europe, just nine years after the end of the Second World War.

All Those Years Ago

There's much more to The Miracle of Bern than a sporting triumph. The West German victory at the Wankdorf Stadium in Bern on 4 July 1954 has long been credited with helping the nation gird itself for the future and stop looking back with guilt and recrimination after the tragedies and traumas of the previous four decades. In order to appreciate the film, therefore, we need to know a bit about the two countries who contested Das Wunder von Bern.

Shortly after the events depicted in Olivier Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2004), the Third Reich surrendered and the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. The impact of a second defeat in 27 years is explored in such features as Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1948), which were known as 'rubble films' because they were set against the bombed ruins of Germany's major cities. The hardships faced by the civilian population, particularly women, are made clear from such unflinching dramas as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Edgar Reitz's Heimat (1984), and Max Färberböck's The Downfall of Berlin: Anonyma (aka A Woman of Berlin, 2008).

As a process of denazification took place, Germany was occupied by British, French, American, and Soviet forces. Around eight million displaced foreigners sought refuge after being released from the Reich's labour, concentration, and extermination camps, while 12-14 million ethnic Germans were forcibly returned following the restoration of pre-war borders. Around nine million remained prisoners of war, as the Kremlin sought to exact revenge for the ravages it had suffered during Operation Barbarossa. France also insisted on economic restrictions to prevent the kind of bellicose recovery that had followed the Great War. This tragic chaos is reflected in The Miracle of Bern, as the Lubanski family struggles on without news of the father who had left for the Eastern Front without even seeing his youngest child.

On 23 May 1949, the Federal and Democratic republics of Germany were proclaimed and the West/East divide remained for the next 41 years, symbolised, from 1961, by the Berlin Wall. However, the escalation of the Cold War prompted the Allies to make West Germany the first line of defence and this allowed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to kickstart the industrial recovery that would lead to the economic miracle ('Wirtschaftswunder') that would occur in the second half of the 1950s.

The same period saw further turmoil in Hungary, after half a century of political upheaval. Detached from the Hapsburg Empire at the end of the Great War, the Kingdom of Hungary existed without a monarch for the next three decades. A revolution in 1918 saw such future film stalwarts as Alexander Korda, Peter Lorre, and Michael Curtiz seek their fortunes elsewhere. But the short-lived regimes of liberal Count Mihály Károlyi and Communist Béla Kun led to the country losing significant amounts of territory at the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.

Serving as Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy sought to steady the ship over the next decade. But Hungary drifted into the orbit of Adolf Hitler, with the Army Cross Party calling for the restoration of lost territories. It also played a prominent part in the Hungarian Holocaust and brought about Horthy's abdication in 1944 in a plot that is outlined in Mark Schmidt's Walking With the Enemy (2013). But the Red Army proved too strong and Hungary was manoeuvred towards a Communist takeover by Mátyás Rákosi, a Stalinist who became leader of the People's Republic of Hungary on 18 August 1949.

A purge resulted in 2000 executions, while a further 100,000 were imprisoned, including Cardinal József Mindszenty, whose plight was explored in both Felix E. Feist's Guilty of Treason (1950) and Peter Glenville's The Prisoner (1955), with Charles Bickford and Alec Guinness respectively playing the persecuted cleric. Industry was nationalised and farms collectivised, as Hungary strove to become Moscow's leading ally. One by-product of this anti-capitalist push was the rise of the Honvéd and MTK Budapest football teams, who were respectively run by the army and the secret police and would provide several of the players who would contest the 1954 World Cup as the reigning Olympic champions.

FIFA Five

With Uruguay bookending two mid-1930s victories by Italy, only two countries had won the World Cup by the time the fifth tournament was held in Switzerland. Indeed, FIFA had banned Germany from the 1950 edition in Brazil, which had seen England make a disastrous debut by losing 0-1 to the United States. This seismic shock was recreated in David Anspaugh's The Game of Their Lives (2005) and was almost repeated in the group stage in Qatar.

In addition to the hosts and holders, 14 teams qualified for the competition, with South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico being the only participants from outside Europe. Appearing in their first World Cup, Scotland lost 0-7 to Uruguay, while the Koreans lost by the same score to Turkey, having previously been beaten 0-9 by Hungary. They had also walloped West Germany by 8-3, leaving the newcomers to stick seven past Turkey in a play-off in order to reach the knockout phase.

The group stages followed a unique rubric that saw two seeded teams play two unseeded teams in each section to determine who qualified for the quarter-finals. Here, Uruguay and Hungary secured 4-2 wins over England and Brazil respectively, while West Germany beat Yugoslavia 2-0. Austria prevailed over Switzerland in a 7-5 thriller, only to lose 6-1 to their German neighbours in the semi-final.

With Hungary defeating holders Uruguay 4-2 in the other game, the final was to be a re-match of the drubbing that the Mighty Magyars had dished out at Basel's St Jakob Stadium. As they were unbeaten in 31 games over five years, most believed that the Golden Team only had to turn up to win the Jules Rimet Trophy. But German coach Sepp Herberger had other ideas.

Where Does the Film Fit into All This?

In the nine years since the war ended, Christa Lubanski (Johanna Gastdorf) has run a bar in the Ruhr city of Essen. She's helped by son Bruno (Mirko Lang), a Communist who plays in a jazz band, and daughter Ingrid (Birthe Wolter), who likes flirting with British soldiers. Youngest child, Matthias (Louis Klamroth), was born after his father, Richard (Peter Lohmeyer), had left to fight in Russia in 1942 and has found a role model in Helmut Rahn (Sascha Göpel), who plays for the local football team, Rot-Weiß Essen.

Rahn thinks Matthias brings him luck and wishes he could join him in Switzerland, when he is called up to the West German squad for the 1954 World Cup. But Richard has no time for football, as he struggles to acclimatise to a changed world. Having got his old job back at the coal mine, he informs Christa that she will have to sell the bar and lets Bruno and Ingrid know in no uncertain terms that he disapproves of their lifestyles. However, he has panic attack on his first day at the pithead and is sent home, where he criticise Matthias for trying to copy Rahn's style while playing with his pals in the street.

Rahn has arrived in Switzerland, where he is put through a rigorous training programme by coach Sepp Herberger (Peter Franke). He is disappointed to miss the opening win against Turkey, however, and embarrassed to be part of the second-string side that is thrashed 8-3 by Hungary. Herberger is ready to discipline Hahn for sneaking out for a beer, but a cleaning lady sets him thinking by noting that the ball is round and a game lasts for 90 minutes.

Feeling sorry for himself after being denied his full POW compensation, Richard is less restrained when he discovers that Matthias has run away from home, with the intention of travelling to Switzerland. But Christa reminds him that the family had been getting along fine before he started trying to be a macho disciplinarian. Richard seeks to atone by buying Matthias a football, but he also kills his pet rabbits for a birthday dinner.

Rahn is also having a tough time accepting strict paternal control, as Herberger leaves him out of the Turkey play-off. But skipper and roommate Fritz Walter (Knut Hartwig) suggests that Rahn might just be the wild card the team needs in the quarter-final against Yugoslavia. So it proves, as he scores the second goal. Walter himself bags a brace against Austria in the semi-final, by which time Richard has won back the respect of his family (after Bruno leaves for East Berlin) by describing the hardships he had endured in the gulag.

Matthias is overwhelmed when his father borrows the pastor's car to drive to Bern so that he can be Rahn's lucky mascot. But the game will depend upon the weather forecast and some screw-in studs.

Coming Off the Bench

Although Sönke Wortmann was born five years after the first of Germany's four World Cup victories, there's a degree of autobiography in The Miracle of Bern. He was born into a coal-mining family in the Ruhr city of Marl and played football for Westfalia Herne and SpVgg Erkenschwick in the lower leagues. Forced to quit through injury, Wortmann studied at the University of Television and Film Munich and the Royal College of Art in London.

He scored a major success with his fifth feature, The Most Desired Man (1994), which he followed with The Superwife (1996) and Campus (1998), which were both adapted from bestselling novels. Having collaborated with Lloyd Bridges on Mr Bluesman (1993), Wortmann joined forces with Burt Reynolds, Tom Berenger, and Rod Steiger on the cult thriller, The Hollywood Sign (2001). But items like St Pauli Nacht (1999), which drew on Wortmann's student experiences as a taxi driver, had a habit of appealing more to critics than punters.

Released to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1954 final, the overtly nostalgic The Miracle of Bern was consciously designed to appeal to a mainstream audience. In his Director's Statement, Wortmann claimed that Germans knew where they were when the Berlin Wall fell and when Die Mannschaft shocked the footballing world. 'What characterised this historical hour was not simply the joy in the victory of a football team,' Wortmann wrote, 'but a kind of collective bliss, an encouraging corrective to the dark years of the Third Reich.'

He insisted that it was initially difficult 'to find an access to this subject, especially concerning how to approach an event that is so deeply anchored in the collective memory of the Germans'. But it's hard to believe that Wortmann and co-scenarist Rochus Hahn were unfamiliar with the fictional linking plot in the official FIFA film of the tournament, Sammy Drechsel, Gerhard Grindel, and Horst Wiganko's German Giants (1954), which followed the efforts of a young Swiss boy named Marco to get to Bern in time for the final.

Authenticity was a key factor in both recreating the look and feel of the times and the calibre of the sporting action. Wortmann auditioned 1500 hopefuls, who had to resemble members of the West German and Hungarian teams and possess decent skills. Sascha Göpel was a particularly fine choice to play Helmut Rahn, as he not only hailed from the same city as 'Der Boss', but he had also met him as a 10 year-old while playing for the junior team at Rot-Weiß Essen.

Rahn had joined the club from Sportfreunden Katernberg for the price of a motorbike and a fence, which meant that the smaller club was able to charge admission, as tickets could only be sold at fully enclosed grounds. He would play on for another 11 years after scoring the World Cup winner before setting up a secondhand car business with his brother. In addition to reading about Rahn, Göpel also discovered that he had been to school with his grandfather. However, Rahn didn't live to see the film dedicated to him, as he died the day after a preview screening and two days before his 74th birthday.

German critics were impressed by the wealth of small details in the picture, such as the players speaking with the regional accents that had helped them forge a bond with the people back home. Similarly, goalkeeper Toni Turek was shown playing the accordion for sing-songs on the team bus, while Wortmann also notes the value of the screw-in studs that had been devised by Adidas, who had only started trading five years earlier. Another nice touch meant that actor Andreas Obering followed to the letter Herbert Zimmermann's original commentary (which can be heard in The Marriage of Maria Braun).

Production designer Uli Hanisch had to recreate the stadium in Bern, as the original Wankdorf had been demolished in 2001. He also had to come up with the Lubanski home, Christa's bar, and the swish apartment of Paul (Lucas Gregorowicz) and Annette Ackermann (Katharina Wackernagel), the fictional journalist and his football-hating wife, who postpone their honeymoon in order to cover the tournament. The production also made plentiful use of the lakeside location where the Germans had stayed. While Wortmann showed the squad developing the famous Spirit of Spiez, he didn't point out that the Hungarians had been kept awake for much of the night before the final by a carnival in their base at Solothurn.

The Germans actually had a spy in the Hungarian hotel to report on the team's preparations. Moreover, claims have since been made that Herberger - who had coached Germany between 1936-42 and had been in charge on the night in 1938 when the England team had notoriously given a Nazi salute during the anthems - took advantage of the absence of any doping laws to have his players (several of whom were part-timers with jobs) injected with a methamphetamine that had been given to Wehrmacht troops during the war to make them feel unbeatable. We shall never know the truth, however, as the team doctor claimed merely to have administered Vitamin C, while a number of team members recalled having been given glucose shots.

As he had to cross-cut between the game and the journey of Richard and Matthias (who are played by real-life father and son, Peter Lohmeyer and Louis Klamroth), Wortmann was hampered in conveying just how exciting the final actually was. Hungary peppered the West German goal after having frittered away an early two-goal lead. In addition to two shots being cleared off the line, the Magyars also hit the post and the bar before Rahn scored the winner with six minutes left. In all, 16 of Hungary's 26 shots were on target, which makes goalkeeper Turek as much the man of the match as Rahn.

Curiously no mention is made of the controversy that followed Rahn's strike, as, two minutes later Welsh linesman, Sandy Griffiths, flagged for offside to deny Ferenc Puskás an equaliser. While this might have added some suspense, it might also have dissipated the feel-good factor that meant The Miracle of Bern won Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival and earned back its costs over its first weekend on general release. Over six million tickets were sold in Germany after Chancellor Gerhard Schröder admitted he had shed tears at the premiere. Indeed, such was the film's impact that Mannschaft manager Jürgen Klinsmann invited Wortmann to sit on the bench during the 2005 Confederations Cup and the 2006 World Cup in Germany to get an insider's view of the campaigns for his two-hour documentary, Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen (2006).