Mythos / Sommer / Märchen. Die Fußball-WM 2006 als Hintergrund zeitgenössischer deutschsprachiger <i>Coming of Age</i>-Romane

Abstract

In Germany, the collective memory of the 2006 World Cup is closely linked to the narrative of the ‘Sommermärchen’ (‘summer fairy tale’). This narrative combines the enthusiasm for the German team’s unexpectedly successful tournament run with heightened national self-confidence and a new desire to express patriotic feel-ings. Although this narrative thus adds national significance to the sport event, the World Cup was hardly addressed in fictional literary narratives for a long time. Recently, however, three coming-of-age novels set in the summer of 2006 have been published: Lars Werner’s Zwischen den Dörfern auf hundert (2023), Luca Kizer’s Pink Elephant (2024) and Christoph Kramer’s Das Leben fing im Sommer an (2025). After some general thoughts on the potential of literary sports narratives, this arti-cle discusses how these three novels refer to the World Cup summer in different ways and how they use this reference for their own narrative endeavours. Our aim is to show how these novels retell, to a certain extent, the ‘Sommermrächen’ while at the same time asserting an inherent logic of literary storytelling against the dom-inance of this myth.